{"id":888,"date":"2007-06-06T13:35:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-06T13:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/?p=888"},"modified":"2007-06-06T13:35:00","modified_gmt":"2007-06-06T13:35:00","slug":"book-review-writing-motherhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2007\/06\/06\/book-review-writing-motherhood\/","title":{"rendered":"Book review: Writing Motherhood"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s my turn to host another stop on a MotherTalk <\/a>blog tour, this one for Lisa Garrigues’ book, Writing Motherhood: Tapping Into Your Creativity as a Writer and a Mother<\/a><\/em>. (Disclosure: for writing this review, I get a free copy of the book and a small honourarium from MotherTalk.)<\/p>\n

The irony is that I have been writing this review for 40 minutes, and I’m only on the second paragraph – not because my words are stuck or any writerly block or lack of inspiration, but because Simon decided he wanted to poop on the potty tonight – which is still an arduous task requiring a team effort – and then laptop seized up, and then dog yakked on the carpet. Writing and mothering are fitful partners. There’s no shortage of material, but often a serious shortage of available time.<\/p>\n

Ahem, so where were we? Oh yes. Book review.<\/p>\n

In Writing Motherhood<\/em>, Lisa Garrigues offers tips and inspiration for mothers who want to write but don’t know where or how to begin. <\/em>She’s an award-winning writer and educator, and each chapter of the book examines a different aspect of writing your “momoir” woven with vignettes from Garrigues’ life. Each chapter ends with a few writing prompts, which Garrigues calls “invitations,” and a select few “inspirations,” salient quotes from writers and mothers. The inspirations I liked, but the invitations less so. Like a few other bloggers who reviewed the book on an earlier leg of the tour for this book, I’m not really a fan of writing prompts. I did, however, tuck a few of them away for blog fodder on a dry day.<\/p>\n

The central premise of the book is that you MUST get yourself a notebook of some sort and transform it into a “Mother’s Notebook.” She devotes more than a page of tips to how to select a notebook, and another page to 13 reasons why you should write longhand. And right there, she lost me. Luddite that I may be, I’m still all about the keyboard. I’m so ridiculously out of practice that it’s physically painful for me to write more than a paragraph, and I type at just the right speed to keep up with my lurching brain most days. Personally, I don’t find handwriting to have any intrinsic craft value. The idea of composing or even recording my first impressions without the easy capability to cut, paste and delete with a keystroke and a swipe of the mouse is nothing short of torturous. Writing longhand may be romantic and creative, but it’s also tedious and way too much work. I do carry a small notebook around with me, but even I have a hard time deciphering the half-formed thoughts and scrawled observations.<\/p>\n

I found Writing Motherhood<\/em> to be more spiritual than practical; there wasn’t any moment when I gasped with inspiration and leapt for my quill (or keyboard), but neither did I find myself flipping impatiently through the pages looking for something of relevance. While I enjoyed the anecdotal style, I think I was hoping for something with more discussion on the craft of writing itself, something like Stephen King’s On Writing<\/em> – a book I found truly inspiring<\/a>, and one Garrigues obviously also admired, as she refers to it often.<\/p>\n

Writing Motherhood, therefore, is a good tool to help you find writerly inspiration from the act of mothering. It reads very much like the sort writing courses that Garrigues teaches, with each chapter examining a different aspect of where mothering and writing might intersect. The end of the book has a great section on resources, with a few books I’d like to pick up from the library for further inspiration. What I would like to see, however, is an expanded section on moving from private musings to published work, and a much larger section on using the Internet to share your work.<\/p>\n

Aside from my disagreement with the central premise of the book, it did inspire me to think about myself as a writer. Garrigues loves the idea of a mother’s notebook, but I see the blog serving the very same purpose. I force myself to write every day on blog, and every now and then I try to shake things up with different formats and styles of writing. Like Garrigues’ mother’s notebook, the blog is a place where I record the minutiae that makes life as a mother both delightful and devastatingly difficult, and also a place where I can play with form, style, and voice. I am slowly giving myself permission to consider myself a writer, even though I’ve yet to get the elusive external validation of a byline in the mainstream media.<\/p>\n

Oh, and while I didn’t completely forget that I offered up my slightly-used copy of The Big Payoff from my last MotherTalk review, I’m a little late. Congratulations to Myra<\/a>! I’ll e-mail you for your snail-mail coordinates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s my turn to host another stop on a MotherTalk blog tour, this one for Lisa Garrigues’ book, Writing Motherhood: Tapping Into Your Creativity as a Writer and a Mother. (Disclosure: for writing this review, I get a free copy of the book and a small honourarium from MotherTalk.) The irony is that I have … Continue reading “Book review: Writing Motherhood”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}