Silences

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January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

A Guide to Making Art as a Parent

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How does a parent maintain a creative hobby? This was the question posed in a recent Care and Feeding column at Slate by an artist and first-time mother. She sketched the arc of her creative life: before motherhood, she supported herself through commissions and sales of her art; now, she was the mostly-solo parent of a toddler, with a husband “who works on remote sites for months at a time,” living in a northern climate that keeps her indoors and isolated with her child until late spring each year. She described trying to sit down at the end of the day to create, but finding her brain “mush,” what with the unrelenting demands of cleaning, meal prep, and other housework lapping at her conscience and executive function. “Even just being able to work on a project in stolen moments would be a relief,” she wrote, “but I give everything I have to keeping our life together and it's still not enough.” The response from Care and Feeding guest columnist Doyin Richards, framed as “tough love,” scolded, “All I’m hearing is a bunch of excuses.” Richards proceeded to rattle off a litany of suggestions (Have you tried sleeping less? Not doing housework? Hiring a nanny, or having a friend or family member babysit?). “Any successful person with young children… will share similar stories of the sacrifices they made to make it to where they are now,” he said. “If they can do it, why can’t you?” “It truly comes down to how badly you want it,” he concluded. As if the burdens and resources of childcare are evenly distributed in our country, as if the artist-mother had simply dismissed the possibility of hiring a nanny due to a lack of desire. This is a familiar, Calvinist idea about who succeeds in making art, and a wrong one, based on a deep misunderstanding—common among not only the general public but also artists and many of those who teach them—about what it takes to sustain an artistic career through a lifetime that includes caregiving. It’s the artistic corollary to the myth of the American dream: that those who succeed in artistic careers are those who wanted, and thus deserved, it most. But who writes to an advice column at their wit’s end because they have lukewarm desire? Wanting is not the issue here; the issue is resources—material, certainly, but also educational. The artist-mother had asked: “How does a parent maintain a creative hobby?” “How” is a question we ask when we want to learn something. What she wanted was to learn how to establish and maintain a creative practice in motherhood. That Richards did not know how to teach her this does not mean that it’s unteachable; it means he wasn’t equipped to do this kind of teaching. Richards is far from alone in his lack of understanding of how mothers can be taught to make, and persist in making, art. In the U.S., both art-making and motherhood are largely viewed as solo endeavors, with success in either viewed as a confluence of talent and determination. The most prestigious writing program in the country reinforces this view, declaring on their program philosophy website, “We continue to look for the most promising talent in the country in our conviction that writing cannot be taught but that writers can be encouraged”—a bold claim for a program offering a graduate degree. This belief in the primacy of talent in an artist’s success is predicated on a narrow understanding of what it means—and what is required—to support an artist’s growth. Contrast Iowa’s statement with James Baldwin’s take on the role of talent in an artist’s development. Asked by the Paris Review if he could “discern talent in someone,” he answered: “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” Baldwin’s valuing of discipline, love, and endurance over talent—and even Iowa’s acknowledgement of the importance of encouragement—highlights the importance of what’s known as the affective domain of learning. The focus of much teaching and learning is often on the cognitive domain—that is, knowledge and the development of intellectual skills. But the affective domain is how we process and respond emotionally to new experiences, information, and challenges. It’s made up of beliefs and mindsets that are hard to quantify but often constitute the most important learning of our lifetimes: how you came to believe something about the world, or about yourself; how you shed old assumptions; how you learned to navigate a new challenge or system. The vast majority of American education focuses on the cognitive domain—on facts and skills, the stuff that’s measured on state tests—unless we’re teaching character traits like “grit” to marginalized middle-schoolers. But in nearly two decades of teaching writing to undergraduate, graduate, and adult writers, I’ve come to understand that the education of writers has to attend as much to the affective domain of learning as it does to the cognitive. This might sound suspiciously woo-woo. I was once a skeptic; my earliest teacher training was all about outcomes and data-driven significant gains and no excuses. I have since shed or significantly modified almost all of those beliefs, but retained a core tenet: that effective teaching really can do something like magic, more than anyone expects it to; that it’s our responsibility as teachers to leverage any and all tools to help our students succeed. Besides, artists spend much of our time trying to portray, describe, analyze the ineffable—why would we doubt its importance in our learning? It’s often said that writing is a career of attrition, and there are few more consistent drop-off points in a woman's career than the birth of a child. When we discuss how to teach writers—especially those who are in some way marginal or vulnerable—we can talk about analyzing and emulating elements of craft, reading and responding to students’ work. But if we are not also tending to teaching them how to keep going—if we are not helping them cultivate the practices and mindsets that help them sustain their work, when everything else in the world makes not-writing the rational choice—we are failing them in one of the most vital domains of their education. Academia might be starting to catch on. The recent success of books on creative writing pedagogy such as Craft in the Real World and The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, and the subsequent implementation of many of the practices recommended therein, in writing classes across the country, points not only to understanding of the vital need to interrupt and reverse the effects of white supremacy on the teaching of literary craft, but more broadly, acknowledgement of the need for closer attention to the affective domain of any program purporting to teach writers. Quite plainly, the affective domain is the subject of the letter that that artist-mother wrote to Slate. Not: how do I apply paint to canvas? How do I shape a scene on a page? But: How do I keep going when I feel so alone? Perhaps Richards’ response left her fired up and determined, which I’m guessing was his intent. But I’m more inclined to imagine her feeling blamed and dispirited, crying in an April snowstorm. * I am a writer, a mother, and a teacher. This fall marks my twentieth heading a classroom or writing program, and my sixth teaching a graduate seminar in creative writing pedagogy in Columbia University’s MFA writing program. This past summer, I led the eighth cohort of a course called “Writing Through Motherhood,” an independent workshop I developed when I was pregnant with my second child, in a determined attempt to avoid winding up exactly where the Care and Feeding’s artist-mother is—which is to say, exactly where I was with my first child. When that first child was born, three years after I graduated with my MFA in fiction, I was in my third year of a demanding job leading a writing center at a public university. I was supervising a staff of 32, pumping breast milk twice a day, bolting out the door at 5pm sharp for a one-hour commute so I could spend what time I could with this new child who I loved more than anything in the world before he fell asleep at 7:30, then waking up multiple times a night to feed him. I did not have a single night of uninterrupted sleep for 18 months. I did my job reasonably well, I parented reasonably well, but I did not write. When a new-mother friend in the neighborhood mentioned the au pair she’d hired for their newborn so that her husband could work on his first novel, I knew this to be so far from my material reality that I didn’t even mention that I wrote, or that I’d written. To call myself a writer would have made me feel like a failure and a fraud. But then, magically, aided by a three-hour time change on a trip to visit friends, my son learned how to sleep through the night. He stopped nursing. A month later, my writer brain came back online, along with a voice that urged: If you want to write, you're going to have to learn how to do it, now. I reached out to a friend from my MFA program who also had a baby, and we established a weekly check-in; I set a weekly writing goal of 3,000 words, an intentionally high-for-me number that would require me to shine a flashlight through the tattered sheet of my schedule to find every possible pinhole of light. I wrote during my lunch break, on my phone on the subway, in those last 15 minutes before I passed out in bed. I started writing regularly, more regularly than I had ever managed before children, or even in my MFA program. The novel that I’d begun in my graduate program began to grow. When I was pregnant with my second child, I vowed: never again would I lose connection with my writing, with myself. And as I spoke to writers who were pregnant or had small children and who shared the same anxieties, I understood that I could guide others on the same path. I hoped that doing so would guide me, too. Based on teaching experience and instinct, I knew some things would help: creating a community; combatting loneliness; establishing purpose and setting goals; connecting to the literary tradition of writing through motherhood; talking honestly about the simultaneous restrictions of time and brain function and the extraordinary blooming of sensitivity and creativity that often accompanies the period of early parenthood. It wasn’t until years later that I encountered a study by the New England Learner Persistence Project, which provided a framework for many of the practices I had intuited and assembled through my teaching. The 2009 NELP project engaged 18 New England-based adult education programs to ask: What drives persistence? What, in other words, makes adult learners—often low-income and/or immigrants, with multiple jobs and families to support—decide to keep showing up to learn, even when so much else in life makes it profoundly difficult? So I’d like to offer an adaptation of this framework now—to the writer of the letter to Care and Feeding, to teachers of writers and other artists, and to anyone out there trying to piece together an artistic practice amid motherhood. To generously interpret the intent of Richards’s response, it is likely true that the writer of the letter is the only one in her life at this moment who is going to decide that this her work is important, and who is able to make it happen. But she doesn’t have to start from scratch, and she doesn’t have to do it alone. * Sense of belonging and community is the first driver of persistence that the NELP report identifies. “It is human nature that when we feel welcomed, respected, and develop a sense of belonging, we are more apt to return to the setting or task then when those factors are not present,” the report claims. “Building community calls for fostering connections among people. Activities and processes that help students get to know one another build trust and camaraderie.” So: the first thing that any parent-artist can do to support their artistic practices is to find at least one other person doing the same. Reach out to someone you know (or knew) in a setting where you made art together in the past, if that exists for you, or seek out others who have similar interests and circumstances. Fates forgive me, but Twitter is actually great for this. A buddy may be all you need to get started. If you wish to take it further, look for the many existing communities established by parent-artists—such as Lenka Clayton’s Artist Residency in Motherhood, Pen Parentis, Writing Through Motherhood alum’s Catherine Mueller’s PAMAs/MAMAs workshops, Nancy Reddy and Emily Perez’s Writing Through the Confetti Time of Caregiving, or the Here to Save You podcast hosted by Annie Hartnett, Tessa Fontaine, and Ellen O’Connell Whittet, among many, many others. Spend a morning Googling; find a community or class that fits your vibe, your budget, your schedule, and connect. The one thing I want to underscore is that you’re not just looking for another artist or writer; you’re looking for another artist-parent, ideally one in a similar stage of parenting as you. (Being the sole parent in a writing workshop can be more isolating than writing solo, in some ways.) Once you have your partner or community, get talking about your lives and your work. Nearly instantly, you will feel less alone, and more capable of going forward. You will watch someone you know and respect struggle and adapt to extraordinary circumstances. You’ll watch them feel like failures, and you’ll give them pep talks when they do, because you can clearly see the truth: that the work they’re making is valuable, and their circumstances are challenging. Then, all of a sudden, you’ll be on the receiving end of that same pep talk. There will be times you won’t believe them. But eventually, you will. And that will help. * I’d like to interrupt NELP’s recommendations with one of my own, specific to artists: Creative exposure and connection. In addition to connecting with other artist-mothers, it’s vital to also connect to art. The artist-mother who wrote to Care and Feeding lamented, “I’ve tried to sit down and make something after my daughter goes to bed, but after a full day with a baby (under stimulating but somehow still exhausting) my brain is mush, and I just want to be passively entertained by the TV or a podcast.” For anyone looking for a toe-hold in creative practice, infusing small amounts of art into your day can help you re-enter the imaginative life of a practicing artist. There are a few ways to achieve this. When you take a drive or a walk with the stroller, or when you’re meal prepping or doing dishes, you might choose a podcast or audiobook (many libraries offer these for free download) or podcast connected to your discipline. At night, if you’re exhausted, by all means wrap those episodes of Ted Lasso or Schitt’s Creek around you like a down comforter. But at least once a week, choose a book or show or film that’s somehow in conversation with your project or creative discipline. Feed your brain and your imagination, and they’ll begin to talk back. It can be particularly powerful to seek out art by mothers in your creative tradition. Often, I ask students in my Writing Through Motherhood workshops to research and read from one artist-mother whose work they admire. When did the writer have children, and when did and how did they make their work? What resources and challenges were present in their lives? How did motherhood show up in or affect their creative work? We are, hallelujah, in a moment of Rachel Yoder and Jacqueline Woodson and Jessamine Chan, of Julia Fine and Lisa Ko and Elena Ferrante, a moment where motherhood is being recognized as the subject of ambitious, creative, intellectually rigorous work. If you’ve absorbed the beliefs that making art about motherhood is sentimental, lightweight, lesser-than, shoring yourself up with work such as these can be empowering. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron calls for weekly “Artist Dates”—solo excursions to immerse oneself in art or the stuff that inspires it. The idea of a solo excursion, let alone something so formal and regular, may feel like a luxury beyond reach for many caretakers of small children. But these can be modified, and often can be done with children. If there are any close by, by all means, take a field trip to a museum or gallery or library or bookshop, or take in a concert or performance. But you can also, simply, read together, draw together, tell stories, write, listen to music, make music. A solo outing to see a play can be a wonderful artist date, but so can that walk with an audiobook while your child naps in their stroller. Crank up the art in your life every way you can, to both feed your imagination and learn from the examples of those who have worked in similar creative circumstances. * Clarity of purpose is the next affective need named in the NELP project, and it refers to making clear the goals and dreams that drive our learning. “By hearing the goals and aspirations of others,” goes the report, “they often expand their notions of what is possible.” To accomplish this clarity of purpose, the NELP recommends establishing concrete goals and creating opportunities for adult learners to see they are making measurable progress. It’s common to have big, lofty goals for our writing—I’m going to write that novel/finish this essay/publish this book. Goals like these, while true, can feel intimidatingly ambitious, distant, and beyond our control. But I was struck by how meager the goal of the advice-seeker in Care and Feeding was: “How do I maintain a creative hobby?” I just want to get back into it.  What can help with both grand and modest goals is setting specific, weekly goals—and, if you’ve found a writing buddy or community, declaring these goals at the start of the week and reporting back at its end. One way to make writing goals more effective is to move away from product goals (I’m going to write X; I’m going to finish Y) and toward process and/or practice goals—because “I want to finish this novel” is huge and vague and unachievable in all except the very last writing session before it’s sent to print. Process goals name a specific next step in your writing or artistic process (I’m going to spend one hour researching this topic. I’m going to revise my conclusion. I’m going to revise the first chapter for imagery, or sound. I’m going to make an outline. I’m going to write three pages of a shitty first draft), while practice goals focus more on simply dedicating time focused on your work (I’m going to write three longhand pages first thing when I wake up, or after I drop my kid off at camp, or before I go to bed. I’m going to spend one 25-minute Pomodoro session writing. I’m going to write 1,000 words this week, or 100, or one sentence a day).  Shifting into a different paradigm of goal-setting—one based in practice or process—can both give us something achievable and concrete to work towards, and help build self-efficacy when we do so. It can also help us make a concrete strategy: not I’ll sit down and see what happens, but I’ll sit down and free-write for 15 minutes. I’ll sit down and revise this scene to make the imagery resonate with the themes of my novel. I’ll sit down and highlight the dialogue between these two characters to make sure their building conflict makes sense. I’ll sit down and see what I have, and then make a note about what I might do next time. The beauty of pairing goal-setting with buddy- or group-system is that we build an accountability structure: for ourselves and for someone else. When we meet our goal, we have someone cheering for us (and perhaps, as my writing buddy Clare Beams and I did in our early days of partnership, sending us prizes from the internet, like videos of otters holding hands, or the latest brilliance from the Awl). And when we don’t, we have someone supporting us anyway, keeping us from beating ourselves up, and making sure we plan for the week ahead. * The next affective need, Agency, extends Clarity of purpose into action. NELP defines agency as “the capacity for human beings to make things happen through their actions.” In other words, deciding what one wants to do is clarity of purpose; finding a way to get it done is agency. When your life shifts from one of relative independence to one that revolves around the feeding, sleep, and care of a tiny human seemingly hellbent on its own death, your agency can feel suddenly, profoundly limited. When the ability to feed yourself, or keep up with laundry, or print a return label, or schedule a doctor’s appointment seems beyond your grasp, carving out time to write, let alone establishing a regular schedule, may sound like a pipe dream. Forget self-actualization; I need to take a shower. Writers can certainly experience a sense of agency from setting a goal, as discussed above, then meeting it. This is another reason that setting appropriately small-scaled goals can be so buoying for a writing practice in motherhood; few things boost a sense of agency like finishing something. A writer in early parenthood may want to try, then, experimenting with writing in crots and fragments. (There’s a reason so many writers who are mothers write in these forms). A crot a day, in your notes app or texted to yourself, can be small, flexible, and quickly add up. Creating something tiny and complete can provide a sense of accomplishment. But alongside writing goals, you can bolster a sense of agency by taking a look at the structures and support around your writing practice. This might mean identifying small toeholds. Can you claim 15 minutes a day for your writing, whether those be stable (every morning when I first wake up) or flexible (the first 15 minutes of the first nap of the day, any 15 minute-stretch I can grab)? If you have a present partner, can you claim a similar stretch at the same time each day where the other person can be solely responsible for childcare? If it’s available, you might even dedicate a small area of your home to writing—a desk, a corner. I often think of helping writers to develop agency in early parenthood as working through the serenity prayer: finding the courage to change what we can, the serenity to accept that we can't, and the wisdom to know the difference. If you want to get started again, but feel hemmed in, try taking 10 minutes to write about what you need and what you want, what you have and what you don't, what might be attainable and what feels beyond possibility, and why. Which parts are material reality, and which are based in the fear of imposing or self-aggrandizing? For one week’s goal, consider naming something you need and taking a step toward it. If you can spend money on these resources, such as childcare, by all means go for it; if not, promise yourself that you’ll find the tiniest ways that you can help support your writing, and commit to them. * “All adults have a need to feel competent in key aspects of their lives,” the NELP declares in its next section, Competence. Is there anything that makes us feel more shockingly incompetent and also more astonishingly capable than parenting? The magic of a child calming quietly only in one’s arms, then the soul-sinking despair when they cannot feed or sleep or develop the way a chart or teacher says they should. Uncertainty paired with certainty, isn’t that the game? The NELP report is passionate on this topic: [A]dults’ beliefs about and realistic assessment of their competence can have a profound effect on their persistence and achievement. … Students with more self-efficacy are more willing to persist to reach their goals in the face of adversity. People who have high self-efficacy visualize success whereas those who doubt their efficacy typically visualize failure. This, I believe, is where Richards’s response went most off-base: through his tone, in the syntax of asking why can’t you, he made the writer visualize and internalize failure. How, then, to visualize and internalize success? The practice of setting and meeting goals will go a long way towards this, as will the study of the works and lives of writer-mothers. But we can also focus on the writing itself, that source of greatest doubt. Consistently, one of the most powerful experiences of Writing Through Motherhood is when students share a small passage of their writing, and receive appreciative feedback. Most of them begin tentative and apologetic; by the end of the process, they practically glow through the Zoom screen. If you’re trying to get back to your writing, consider sharing your work with a trusted partner or group. Critique, suggestions—these absolutely have a place in the writing process, but the point where you’re trying to get going, to generate new ideas, to find enough bravery just to come to the page: that ain’t it. Tell your readers explicitly what you need in response instead: to hear what resonates, what’s beautiful, what lingers in their memories, what sparks their imagination, what they want to keep reading, what they hope to see more of. This might feel self-indulgent at first, but if it helps to re-frame it: Isn’t encouragement, and the building of confidence, an essential part of parenting? What happens when we shine that light on ourselves? If you were your child, what would you say to you? In a recent study, an experimental psychologist randomly sorted a group of ordinary rats into two cages—one labeled as containing particularly smart rats, the other labeled particularly unintelligent. Researchers were then tasked with running the rat through a maze over the period of a few weeks, and recording their progress. Consistently, the rats whose humans thought they were smarter performed better. I think about this a lot in terms of teaching, especially for learners who may have been told or convinced themselves that they’re the bad rats—not “good” or “real” writers or artists. I mentally run my finger on the soft fur between my students’ ears, and whisper, You are the best rat, and then let them run. * The next driver of persistence is Relevance—the degree to which learning activities resonate and correlate with adult learners’ goals, interests and life experiences. For writers-mothers, this question quickly becomes existential: What on earth does writing have to do with my daily life? What do I possibly have to say? How could this matter? I note how the writer of the Care and Feeding letter described what was clearly a previous artistic “career,” but in her question, she demoted this work to “hobby.” The question of relevance can feel particularly hard in a country where resources to support mothers are so scarce. It’s hard to defend art, the time and money that goes into it, the lack of observable productivity. Everyone loves art, but few people have the patience for what it takes to make it. And for most of us, the majority of choices in parenting are driven by economic necessity. It’s easy to say: This novel, this painting, this song—what does this have to do with our lives, what we need to survive? For this reason, I’ll often ask my students to read writer-mothers talking on the importance—and, crucially, the necessity—of writing in their lives. We read Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Joan Didion’s “Why I Write,” Tillie Olsen’s “Silences.” Tillie’s a bummer in this piece, asking, “What is it that happens with the creator, to the creative process,” during literary silences? The silences she speaks of “are unnatural; the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.” After tracing various causes of literary silence through history, she turns, finally, to mothers. “The circumstances for sustained creation…” she says, are “nearly impossible. The need cannot be first. It can have at best, only part self, part time…. More than any human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible… It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil.” She concludes that there is no reconciliation for “what is lost by unnatural silences.” Modern parenthood is often framed as a series of competing priorities and ideas, but what can help create a sense of relevance is to consider art and life not as two competing forces, but as interwoven and complementary. This passage, from Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, summarizes it beautifully: There was a time, when I first found out I was pregnant with twins, that I saw only a state of conflict. When I looked at theater and parenthood, I saw only war, competing loyalties, and I thought my writing life was over. There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me... and finally I came to the thought, All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow. And then I could breathe. I could investigate the pauses. I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is also a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion. Once we’ve read the work above, I ask writer-mothers to draft their own “Why I Write” manifestos together in class. Then we read excerpts aloud, because it helps to know you’re doing work not only to convince yourself, but to convince others. What we learn every time: Why mothers write has everything to do with the world they are trying to create, with the person they are trying to become, and the people they are raising. What could be more relevant to parenting? With these words in front of them, a small voice is squashed—This is a luxury; it has nothing to do with my life. Writing supports parenting; parenting supports writing: they fortify and inform each other. * The final driver of persistence is Stability. “Learning is difficult in an environment that is chaotic or unstable,” the report declares, and there are few more universal markers of the early days of parenthood than a lack of stability—a field of landmines of waking and sleeping, feeding, and diaper-changing and soothing. So much of our culture’s mythos about who a writer is seems built around stability; the imperative to write every day, to start the morning with three pages, to build a routine. But if that schedule simply isn’t possible, what choices exist? Some of what has been covered already contributes to a sense of stability. Joining a class or a group or a collective, finding an accountability partner, setting goals: if you can find someone external to yourself to help you establish this environment, wonderful. But courses are often temporary, and the years are long. What’s important to remember, I think, is that stability, as an affective need, should not be confused with consistency. That is, something does not need to be exactly the same in order to be permanently present. And that one of the most important things we can help stabilize is a writer’s sense of self-as-artist. One of the first things we often discuss in Writing Through Motherhood is what it means for someone to be a writer. This often surfaces in introductions—someone will feel it necessary to say that they’re not really a writer. I’ll raise the question: Who is? “Someone who publishes a book,” is almost always the first answer. “Ah, but we have another word for that—author,” I say. “Someone who makes a living from writing.” “But for this we have a modification—professional writer.” It’s easy, too, to rattle off a long list of writers who write as a side gig, working other full- and part-time jobs while they eke out words on the side. I’ll ask: If someone tells you they’re a runner, do you immediately believe they are making claims about Olympic goals and Nike sponsorships? Is someone who calls themself a gardener clearly vying to design the Rose Garden? Why is it that, the closer we get to the arts, the more we feel we need to prove that we have earned our title with pay or even livelihood? What if we trust the most essential meaning of the word writer? Usually someone in the group is a current or former K-12 teacher, and they will recite something they’ve told their students: A writer is someone who writes. “Do you believe this when you tell it to your students?” I ask. “Absolutely.” “Do you believe it for yourself?” They’ll shift in their seat. Because what does it mean to claim and defend a label of our desires? The friction comes, I believe, from identifying ourselves both to ourselves and to others. To not want to mislead, to not put on airs or pretensions. But who does it hurt if you tell someone you’re a writer? Who does it hurt if you deny it? And if, in early parenthood, you have shown up to the page or to a writing workshop, in person or online, even having paid to be there, amid all the other obligations in your life, what further proof do you need of your own commitment? Writer, painter, dancer, runner, gardener: these all take the -er suffix, which corresponds to the Latin -or, designating an actor or agent, or the Old English -ere “man who has to do with.” On its surface, the word mother looks like it might follow the same pattern, and a false etymology might likewise suggest the name comes from the performer of a verb. But mother, like father, and sister, and brother, takes its -er from a suffix that denotes not doing, but kinship. What if we replace, as an imaginative act, the -er in writer with the -er of mother? What changes if we consider ourselves writers as those who are kin to writing? Let’s lean into the fullest, most positive possibilities. Kin can be something we hold close to us, that often defines us. Kin can be someone we love and who loves us back, one we tend to and who tends to us. Sometimes we don’t see kin for a long time. But the bond is still there. What if, in those stretches where we struggle to make it to the page—when we’re most beating ourselves up for not showing up, for our lack of discipline, an inability to focus—we think of ourselves not as writers, but of writing as kin: a home outside ourselves that will always be there for us. Perhaps, then, we can better weather the dry stretches, the highs and lows, the days and weeks and months and years when the most stable element of writing seems to be the desire for it and the absence of the wherewithal to sit down and do it. It does get better, and exponentially so when your kids start to have a more steady bedtime and wake-up, and when they enter some sort of predictable daily schedule that includes childcare or school. You and writing will be there for each other. And when you’re ready and able to return, you have steps you can take to reestablish that relationship. A grace note in the NELP discussion of relevance I think is worth sharing: “The degree of perceived relevance of the instructional program to the adult learners goals, interests, and life experience is a key factor in adults’ motivation to persist in their studies even if they need to stop out for a while.” * One of the most vital skills we learn in parenthood is what advice to internalize and what to ignore. Motherhood forges our sense of our own authority and integrity, because bad advice isn’t only a threat to ourselves, it’s also a threat to our children. So I say to the writer of the Care and Feeding letter: Former writers of this column, like Nicole Chung and Nicole Cliffe, both writer-mothers themselves, probably would have hit this question out of the park for you. This respondent was simply a bad match, with bad advice that you should dismiss as easily as the insistence that your kid should be wearing another sweater. Mothering is the hardest it’s been in a long time. The pandemic has brought us illness and the threat of illness, isolation, supply chain disruptions, and, more broadly, the stripping of formal and informal social supports, and the mounting awareness of how uniquely hung out to dry mothers are in the U.S. I finished the first draft of a novel with my infant daughter curled on my chest (which, let’s be clear, tends to be a much easier stage than toddlerhood). I finished a full revision of that book while supervising remote schooling for two kids in the pandemic, and I continue today. The work is slower than I want, but it is always there, and I am always connected to it. I was only able to do it because of community, artistic exposure, clarity of purpose, and senses of agency, competence, relevance, and stability. I assembled these over many years, bit by bit, largely in conversation with other writers who are mothers. To the letter-writing artist-mother, to any writer or artist wanting to create in parenthood: You are not alone. You are connected to community, a tradition, a legacy. You are a writer because writing is your kin. Nothing will take that away from you. You don’t have to prove it or defend it. But you want to connect with it—listen to that. [millions_email]