Welcome!

Pandemic Releases, Writing as a New Mom and Other Thoughts

Hello!

I have long thought of creating a newsletter and it has for all that time lived in the category of things I am not good at— like excel spreadsheets, driving, knowing where I am in space, and pretending things that aren’t true. But lately I’ve been having ideas for mini-essays, I’ve been wanting to share things I’ve loved reading or watching or listening to or doing, I’ve been craving connection, and I am making the leap.

I was going to wait and start when the perfect mood struck, but I have been looking through my photos in the phone, making new photo albums for my kid who keeps ripping ours up, and I came across some photos that indicated that today is the one year anniversary of my YA novel, EVER CURSED, hitting shelves. And I thought— oh, I have some things to say about that.

The tragedies of 2020 are endless and profound and ongoing, and my book releases are low on the list— even in my own life. I was preoccupied all year with what my kid was missing out on— playgrounds and friends and school and family and holidays and traditions and the best version of me. But lately, there has been space for me to consider the way 2020 was as an author who released books.

Because I did. I had 3 books come out in 2020, and have had 2 come out in early 2021. That is 5 pandemic books— the biggest number of books in a short period of time in my career. And though I have been distanced from my own feelings about that, the feelings are starting to surface.

What is hard about these five books, when I consider the way it hurts to not have been in bookstores, to miss out on readers finding my stories, is that these are the five books I have written since becoming a mom. EVER CURSED was what I jumped into first, when my kid was a newborn and I was in a haze, finding twenty minutes here or there to get something on paper. It wasn’t for my editors or agent that I wrote— they were happy to give me the time and space I needed to explore my new identity as a parent. It was for me. I wrote for me, to make sure I was still there. I wrote to touch base with myself, to wake myself up, to ground myself, to let myself know that my life was changing but that some things would remain, and writing was one of those things.

I am a writer, but I don’t have the words to express what writing in those early days — and even now— means to me. When I was wearing ill-fitting clothes and navigating the physical hardships of postpartum life and wishing I wasn’t all alone with a newborn every single day, and trying to understand how I fit into the world while celebrating the enormous accomplishment of walking down the street to pick up a latte with my kid strapped to my chest, writing was there for me. I have many joyful moments of parenting, but some of the biggest joys were the mornings when my daughter would fall asleep at a time of day when I still had a little bit of energy, and I would bring out my laptop and sit at the kitchen counter, while she napped in some baby contraption next to me, and I could look at her and look at my words and I could feel complete, I could feel like I was my two selves at once.

The books that released during this pandemic are the ones that I I folded myself around when I was lost and sad and too tired to be coherent. They were the ones that held me up and let my brain think about something other than the ticking off of hours between feedings and sleeps. They were what made me feel I could be a person, at a time when my own personhood felt cloudy and uncomfortable. They were what I felt I was sharing with her, see, kid, we are doing this. We are okay.

That these books— EVER CURSED, my HAND-ME-DOWN MAGIC series, and ONE JAR OF MAGIC— released into an even more complicated and unsettled and troubled space feels heavy sometimes. They brought me this uncomplicated joy, in the writing. They brought me clarity in who I was and what my life might look like. I think I expected their release into the world to be similarly joyful and uncomplicated and sweet.

And of course, there have been moments of sweetness. There always are. But I wish there was a clearer path between the two realities— getting my kid— that one time!— to take a nap at the cafe I loved to write at while I managed to tap out a few hundred words— and getting to see the books I wrote on the shelves.

I knew so much would change, in the intervening years. I did the calculations. Oh, my kid will be two when this book comes out, how wild! I will certainly be a whole other kind of person, then, a whole other sort of mother who knows what she’s doing, who knows how to make this all work! But I was missing so much data, it turns out. It wasn’t math, that was happening. Or magic either, I guess. It was just the truth, which is that a person can be many things in one moment, which is that writing brings me joy even on the hardest, blurriest days, which is that being a parent is difficult and lovely, which is that 2020 was an awful year, which is that the only thing I can control is the writing itself, and sometimes not even that.

I wish the equation was simpler. I wish those days of swelling up with pride at having written a scene while my two -month old napped and the household buzzed with things that needed doing but that I had chosen not to do meant something clear and strong and perfect.

But that wouldn’t be writing, I guess. Or parenthood. Or life, either, of course.

I hope you’ll join me in this space to muse and share about writing and mom-ing and being and truth-ing.

Now for some recommendations:

I’m reading and loving: ALL ADULTS HERE by Emma Straub

I am listening to and loving the podcast that takes apart diet culture with humor and facts, Maintenance Phase

I am watching, of course, The Bachelorette and The Real Housewives of Potomac, because one can’t be highbrow and cerebral all the time.

Oh and tomorrow I will be cooking this perfect apple-carrot bread.