What we talk about when we talk about work (& home), pt. 2
Women's writing is moving beyond the double-bind of private and public life, and facing backlash
News!
I am teaching one last online seminar before fall on Monday 10am-1pm PT. It’s called Writing Recovery, but the class is not only for those writing after addiction. It’s for anyone recovering from depression, divorce, loss, motherhood, burnout, health issues, etc. We will sink into some writing prompts, quiet writing time, and discuss and connect. I’ll be celebrating 3 years of sobriety, too. Sign up here.
I had one spot open up in June to work one-on-one with a writer on a partial or full manuscript. If you’re interested, fill out this form. I will reach out with more information if I think we are a fit. I may also have some spots in August.
Weekly threads for the Writing Group are moving to chat in the Substack app. Let’s see how this goes for the month of June. We can always adjust if folks don’t love the chat/app. Remember, Writing Group closes up in July for the summer, but I’ll be sending one last craft essay and prompt out next week, and we’ll have a few more threads and chats in June.
Earlier this week, the author of a review of three “divorce memoirs” claimed those books prioritize career over motherhood and buy into a version of self-worth defined by The Father. The review claimed the books are therefore “stuck in the 1960s.” The piece also claimed these writers “marginalize mothering” and implied that women would do better to return to “the local, the intimate, the granular, the home.”
Friends, the truth is that I had a physical reaction to this review, and not only because I love the books and writers analyzed in the piece, or because I take issue with how the review writer fails to carefully parse the critique of capitalism and creativity she presents, or because the review begs the question of how exactly we are defining the relationship between home, motherhood, and marriage. I am just so frustrated with seeing women’s intricate, nuanced, artful, precise, shrewd writing whittled down and tossed off as standing too firmly on one side of the private/public binary.