Good Mom on Paper

Writers on Creativity and Motherhood

edited by Stacey May Fowles & Jen Sookfong Lee

tagged: women authors, motherhood, essays

Description

The experience of motherhood is monumental, yet rarely discussed in connection with literary or creative life. How do we navigate the twin devotions of love and art? How does motherhood disrupt the creative process? How does it enhance it?

Good Mom on Paper is a collection of twenty essays that goes beyond the clichés to explore the fraught, beautiful, and complicated relationship between motherhood and creativity. These texts disclose the often-invisible challenges of a literary life with little ones: the manuscript written with a baby sleeping in a carrier, missing a book launch for a bedtime, crafting a promotional tour around child care. But they also celebrate the systems that nurture writers who are mothers; the successes; the intricate, interconnected joys of these roles.

Honest and intimate, critical and hopeful, this collection offers solace and joy to creative mothers and asks how we can better support their work. Mothers have long been telling each other these vital stories in private. Good Mom on Paper makes them available to everyone who needs them.

With contributions by Heather O'Neill, Lee Maracle, Jael Richardson, Carrie Snyder, Alison Pick, Meaghan Strimas, Sofia Mostaghimi, Rachel Giese, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Erin Wunker, Jónína Kirton, Jennifer Whiteford, Teresa Wong, Nikkya Hargrove, S. Lesley Buxton, Amber Riaz, Adelle Purdham, Harriet Alida Lye, and Kellee Ngan.

A portion of each sale will be donated to the Mothers Matter Centre: a not-for-profit organization dedicated to empowering isolated, at-risk mothers.

About the Authors

Stacey May Fowles

STACEY MAY FOWLES is an award-winning journalist, essayist, and author. Her bylines include the The Globe and Mail, The National Post, Reader's Digest, Toronto Life, The Walrus, BuzzFeed, Vice, Hazlitt, Quill and Quire, and others. Her books include Good Mom on Paper: Writers on Creativity and Motherhood, and Baseball Life Advice, which was a national bestseller and was selected by The Globe and Mail and Maisonneuve as a best book of the year. A former columnist at the The Globe and Mail, she currently writes the Book Therapy column for Open Book Ontario. Fowles lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter.

Jen Sookfong Lee was born and raised on Vancouver's East Side, and she now lives with her son in North Burnaby. Her books include The Conjoined, nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize; The Better Mother, a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award; The End of East; Gentlemen of the Shade; Chinese New Year and The Animals of Chinese New Year. Jen was a columnist for CBC Radio One's The Next Chapter for many years. She teaches at The Writer's Studio Online with Simon Fraser University, edits fiction for Wolsak & Wynn and co-hosts the literary podcast Can't Lit.

Editorial Reviews

“Reader, I fist-pumped. In essay after essay – and I savoured every one; they are so beautifully written—mothers offer glimpses into their processes, their challenges, their grief. Their lives.” — The Globe and Mail

“Some of the essays broke my heart. Some of them made me smile. Some of them gave me hope that there is a way to forge a path in this space.” — Cloud Lake Literary

“Referencing strong female writers, both past and present — Virginia Woolf, Anne Carson, Alice Walker, Sylvia Plath, Claudia Dey — each writer shares their experience, strength and hope and invites all women, not just moms and writers, to ‘challenge traditional forms of styles of cultural enquiry.’” —Toronto Star

“This collection denounces the commonly held belief that motherhood and writing are in contradiction to one another–its existence alone is proof enough.” — The Miramichi Reader

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