Enter Today to Win Mama, PhD!
September 25th, 2009
My friend and fellow mama-writer, one of the most savvy internet book marketing women I know, Christina Katz, is once again running her Writer Mama Back-to-School Giveaway where she gives away one book or magazine subscription every day in September. On September 25th, I’m delighted that Mama, PhD will be included in a trio of anthologies edited by Literary Mama editors Shari MacDonald Strong and Amy Hudock.
Our books — Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life; The Maternal Is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change; and Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined–will be up for giveaway on September 25th. To see a complete list of what you can win, visit Christina’s Writer Mama blog. You can enter every day if you want, so bookmark her site and visit again and again. Good luck!
Joanne Rendell Interview, part two!
September 18th, 2009Today we’re running the second part of our interview with Crossing Washington Square author, Joanne Rendell; read the first part here.
Mama, PhD: If you weren’t a writer, what else would you do?
JR: I can’t get enough of the book world so I’d probably choose to be an editor or agent. I’m sure its hard and sometimes frustrating work, but it would be so fun to work with authors on their books and seeing the books going out into the world and into stores.
Mama, PhD: What’s your routine when you sit down to write each day?
JR: I write in the morning before my son gets up. I usually start by doing what I call the “author laundry” work, in other words answering emails, updating my blog, twittering etc. Sometimes I get so sucked in by all these things, it’s hard to shut them off and get down to writing. But I always try and force myself to write a few hundred words a day. Even if they turn out to be utter rubbish and I scrap them the next day, at least I have words and ideas on the page.
Mama, PhD: Do you have a writing group, or a particular person with whom you share your work in progress? Do you have a writing mentor?
JR: I’m not in an official writing group, but I do share my writing with a couple of author friends who give me feedback (and I give feedback on their work). I couldn’t write without them! Their feedback has been invaluable and simply having cheerleaders who say “keep going, this is great” has been wonderful. I don’t have a real-life mentor, although, through their books, wonderful writing teachers such as Carolyn See, John Gardner, and Francine Prose have proved important mentors.
Mama, PhD: What effect has publishing two successful novels had on your life or your writing routine?
JR: It’s definitely had a very motivating effect – it makes me want to keep on writing. However, there are many promotional demands put on writers these days. Book sales are dwindling, publisher’s marketing budgets are being slashed, and thus authors are expected to help get the word out about our books. We have to write blogs, connect with readers through Facebook and Twitter, and go out and do readings and talks. All of this is generally a lot of fun, but it does take away from precious writing time.
Mama, PhD: What kind of impact has motherhood had on your work, your process, or your priorities?
JR: As a grad student, it took me three and a half years to write an 80K word dissertation. Since my son was born six years ago, I have written three novels (all over 100K words). It would seem that with the demands of motherhood you’d become less productive. The opposite was clearly true for me! Once I took up the fiction writing path, and found myself loving it, I just became very organized and driven. I’ve always written when my son sleeps and the ticking clock has been wonderful for my productivity.
Mama, PhD: You wrote last year about keeping your child home, “unschooling,” instead of sending him to kindergarten; is he still spending his days out of school, and what impact has that had on your writing?
JR: So far, homeschooling Benny hasn’t impacted too much on my writing schedule. I was a stay-at-home mum before Benny was official school age (he didn’t go to pre-K or nursery) and managed to carve out the time to write three books. I’m lucky that I am still managing to find that time. Of course, it involves a lot of juggling and scheduling, but we manage it. “Homeschool” is somewhat a misnomer, of course, as we spend a relatively small amount of time schooling at “home.” We live in New York so are lucky enough to have an amazing array of fun and educational places on our doorstep. Benny and I, together with his homeschooled friends, are always out on trips to the Met, the Natural History Museum, aquariums, zoos, galleries, libraries, and parks. When we’re not out and about, Benny and I love to read – either together or separately. I’m so thankful he loves books like I do and I feel I’m learning so much as a writer through Benny’s books and his homeschool experiences in general. Inspired by another homeschool family, we recently started a loose history curriculum in which we’ve studied dinosaurs, early man, Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt followed by Ancient Greece and Rome. We’ve combined relevant story and picture books, play with history-themed toys, and trips to museums. Benny has learnt a lot, but it’s amazing how much I’ve learned too about Greek myths, ancient texts and civilizations. I feel my mind – and my writing – expanding because of these studies!
Mama, PhD: Will you share what you are working on now?
JR: I’m working on final edits for my third novel which was bought by Penguin last fall. The novel tells the story of a woman (another female professor, in fact!) who thinks she might be related to the nineteenth century writer, Mary Shelley. On her journey to seek the truth and to discover if there really is a link between her own family and the creator of Frankenstein, Clara unearths surprising facts about people much closer to home – including some shocking secrets about the ambitious scientist she is engaged to. The book is told in alternating points of view between Clara and the young Mary Shelley who is preparing to write Frankenstein.
Mama, PhD: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us, and best of luck on your next book!
Crossing Washington Square: Review & Interview!
September 15th, 2009Back in the spring, Joanne Rendell contacted us about the possibility of reviewing her new book, Crossing Washington Square. As it turns out, Caroline’s mom had just recommended Joanne’s first book, The Professors’ Wives’ Club to us, and so we were primed to read her popular novels about the personal lives of academics.
After reading her books, we decided we wanted to know more about Rendell’s background and how a writer who was born and educated in the UK came to know so much about higher education in the United States. So following our review of Crossing Washington Square here, we’ll post (in two parts) an interview with her about writing, mothering, and the difference between US and UK dorm life.
Ah, study abroad: The intellectual opportunities! The cultural experiences! The chance to live with and learn from a global student population!
Or so study abroad is billed. But of course truthfully, study abroad is often an opportunity to flee bad relationships and drink a lot of very good beer. Even earnest, studious students like the two of us found ourselves frequently distracted from libraries and lectures. We turned out okay—finished our time abroad without many heartaches or hangovers—and then continued on to finish our BAs, an MFA and a PhD. Now we lead quiet lives with husbands and kids; when we look at pictures from our study abroad days, we barely recognize ourselves.
And so we leapt at the chance to read Crossing Washington Square, Joanne Rendell’s entertaining new novel about two female English literature professors at the fictitious Manhattan University. A tense relationship is only the beginning of a story that culminates with Literary London, a two-week student trip abroad.
Personal and academic sparring forms the heart of the conflict between the novel’s two protagonists. Rachel, a scholar of popular literature, devotes her study to books like Bridget Jones’ Diary, while Diana, a Sylvia Plath scholar, disdains her younger colleague’s work and the implications it holds for the traditional canon. Both women are single, and inevitably find themselves drawn to the same man in their department.
For readers like us, who unashamedly read both Fielding and Plath yet understand how charged the stakes can be in academic turf disputes, the story’s a page-turner. The conflicts–over both literature and love– come to a head when the two women find themselves unexpectedly co-chaperoning the Literary London trip.
Of course as studying abroad students, we never really thought about the faculty’s experience. We never thought about their personal lives at all. But now we have friends and family members who are university faculty; we witness their struggles to combine work and family, sympathize with their difficult schedules, read their draft manuscripts and yes, visit when they lead student study abroad trips. Those trips don’t look so easy as they did when we were being led gently by the hand from this historical point of interest to that literary landmark. Reading the book made us want to find out more about author Joanne Rendell’s own background, and so we wrote to ask about her own educational experience, her writing life, and her take on motherhood and academia. Read on!
Mama, PhD: What was your inspiration for CWS?
Joanne Rendell: As someone who has lived the academic life (I have a PhD in literature and now I’m married to a professor at NYU), I’ve always loved campus novels such as David Lodge’s Trading Places, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, Richard Russo’s The Straight Man, Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. But what I noticed about such campus fiction was the lack of female professors in leading roles. Even Francine Prose and Zadie Smith focus on male professors in their writing. Furthermore, most of these male professors are disillusioned drunks who quite often sleep with their students, or at least consider sleeping with their students or are accused of it. I wanted to write a novel with women professors at the forefront and I wanted these women to be strong, smart, and interesting – instead of drunk, despondent, and preoccupied with questionable sexual liaisons!
Mama, PhD: How closely do any of the events in CWS connect to events in your own life?
JR: Like one of my characters, Professor Diana Monroe, I once taught Sylvia Plath to undergraduates. Like Professor Rachel Grey, my other lead character, I sometimes struggled to ignite a discussion in a room full of tired students! Crossing Washington Square is also set at Manhattan U. which closely resembles NYU where my husband teaches and where we live in faculty housing. So there’s a lot of me and my life in the book, but the story of the two very different women and their struggles against each other is definitely fictional.
Mama, PhD: How did you develop the characters of Diana and Rachel?
JR: I knew I wanted to write a book about women professors and at some point while I was working on this idea, I reread Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. I’ve always loved Austen’s portrayal of the two very different Dashwood sisters: Elinor led by her sense and Marianne led by her irrepressible sensibilities. I enjoyed putting these two types of women in a modern context and then adding opposing views of literature to stir up more sparks between them. Professor Rachel Grey is emotional and tempestuous and uses chick lit in her classes. Meanwhile, Professor Diana Monroe is cool, aloof, and controlled. She is a scholar of Sylvia Plath and thinks that “beach” fiction is an easy ride for students. They do not get along!
Mama, PhD: In your experience, are the university “old guard” as resistant to change in the canon as you portray them in the book? Why do you think this is?
JR: There are still many people in academe who are resistant to change, although my depiction of the “old guard” in Crossing Washington Square is probably a little exaggerated. But not too much. Even now it is hard for scholars interested in more modern and popular culture to be taken seriously and to have their courses and their publications accepted and valued by their institutions. I recently wrote a piece for The Huffington Post about scholars interested in romance fiction (think Harlequin and Nora Roberts). The field is growing considerably, but it is still very small considering the huge popularity of romance novels. I suppose the “old guard” want to protect their work and their disciplines and they probably do genuinely believe – as Professor Monroe does in my book – that classical or serious literature will get pushed aside by students and scholars wanting to study supposedly “hot” and “trendy” cultural artifacts.
Mama, PhD: You grew up and earned your degree in the UK; you’re married now to an American and live in residence at NYU. What do you see as the differences between the British and American college experience?
JR: The British system, I think, encourages students to be more independent in their studies. In the U.S., there seems a more top-down approach: a lot more required credits and supervision. The U.S. student experience also seems a lot more sober! I know, for any of you in the U.S. who’ve experienced or witnessed frat houses and beer pong, you might think that laughable. But in Britain the drinking age is 18 and sometimes it seems like the whole university experience is built around alcohol – some dorms even have their own bars!
Mama, PhD: The only mother we see in the book is the wife of an assistant professor–as a mother yourself, do you feel that motherhood and the academy are somehow incompatible?
JR: I don’t think they are incompatible, but I do think it is a big challenge to do both and I hugely admire the women who pull it off (my best friend is one of them). Motherhood is a 24/7 job so to add writing lectures, grading papers, going to faculty meetings, writing journal articles etc. on top is just a very hard thing to do. It clearly involves a lot of juggling, scheduling, toughness, and support.
Mama, PhD: How has living in faculty housing shaped your experiences as a mother/writer? Your perceptions of the academy?
JR: My husband and I are actually faculty-in-residence which means we live in an apartment in one of NYU’s dorms and run all kinds of programs and events for the students. Sometimes when I tell people we live in the dorm they’re horrified – probably imagining some sort of Animal House scenario! However, we’ve had nothing but great experiences. The students in the dorm really appreciate our presence and our programs. Also, it’s been wonderful for us, providing an immediate community, lots of “friends” for Benny our six year old son, and it has also has shown us a lot about students today. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how polite, engaged, and enthusiastic all the students seem to be.
Mama, PhD: You have a PhD in literature and no longer teach; when did you decide to leave the classroom behind, and what was the transition from academia to creative writing like for you?
JR: I left academia after I finished my PhD and when I moved to the States to be with my husband and to have my son. When I was pregnant, I assumed I would start applying for academic jobs after the baby was born. But then my pregnancy rolled on, my son arrived, and the longer I was out of academe the more content I felt. No meetings, no teaching prep, no never-ending reading lists, no hours fretting over a lost citation. I watched as my husband went through all this and it didn’t make me yearn for the academic life. Also, I just couldn’t imagine being able to juggle my newborn with all the demands of a tenure-track job.
When my son was just a few months old, I saw an ad for a creative writing class and it suddenly occurred to me that there was something I missed: writing and the writing life I had back in grad school. But creative writing? I wasn’t sure if that was really me. After all, I had years of literature student baggage weighing me down. How would I ever write fiction without thinking about the grad students who might one day pull my writing apart? How would I choose what to write? Would I be postmodern, feminist, queer, or deconstructive?
In the end though, I got over my fears and signed up for my very first creative writing class. There was no looking back after that.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tune in later this week for the rest of our interview with Joanne Rendell, in which she talks with us about her writing routine, “unschooling” her child, and what’s next for her.
Free to Be. . . Mom and Me: Finding My Complicated Truth as an Academic Daughter
September 14th, 2009Megan Pincus Kajitani was writing a series of articles for the Chronicle of Higher Education when Miriam Peskowitz (one of our wish-list writers) introduced us. We read her work and knew we wanted her wise, compassionate voice in the collection.
We were surprised by her story, because we didn’t realize that Megan was an academic daughter herself! As she writes in her essay:
“A PhD in accounting, my mother has gone from popular professor at one major business school to highly respected department chair in another, was thoroughly present for me and my brother growing up, and has a happy, thirty-seven-year marriage to my father, who is also an academic. She defies the studies I have cited in my Chronicle of Higher Education columns on the challenges of career/family balance in academia—studies that show women on the tenure track are less likely to have as many children as they want, and to make their marriages work, than tenured men or nontenured women. Several of my academic mentors fit the studies’ disheartening description. But my mom pretty much has it all.”
“My mother never pressured me to have an academic career like hers, and she never pressured me to get married or have babies. In fact, her pressure actually came in the form of subtly urging me not to marry young (even though she did and got “lucky,” as she calls it). The only outright requests she ever made of me were that I not become a cheerleader and I not pursue a career in acting, my adolescent fantasy. The cheerleader request was for obvious reasons from a 1970s feminist mother (and is a request I plan to pass down to my own daughter), and the acting because, living south of Hollywood, we knew many talented but starving actors, and CPA Mom didn’t like the odds. Other than that, she just told me to do what made me happy.”
Megan did enter a PhD program, as she describes in her essay, and then decidesdto leave — a decision that opened a pathway to a new career as an academic adviser and then a freelance writer and editor.
After publishing her essay in Mama, PhD, Megan contributed to the Mama, PhD blog on Inside Higher Ed, writing a weekly advice column, The Career Coach Is In. Today, she writes, “I’ve continued to evolve as a freelancer since Mama, PhD came out. After leaping at the great opportunity to be a personal story editor for Miriam Peskowitz on her chapters of The Daring Book for Girls, I remembered just how much I love editing books (one of my pre-academia jobs). So I jumped a the next opportunity, to edit the 4th edition of the teacher-training bestseller, The First Days of School, by Harry and Rosemary Wong, and then got to work with Miriam again on The Double-Daring Book for Girls. I am finding book editing to fit very well with mothering for me, and I now have three more book editing projects in the works. My writing these days comes when the mood strikes, as did the essay about my first pregnancy that Mothering Magazine published last fall.
“On the personal side, I’ve greatly enjoyed the ability to be present at home for my daughter Senna, who was just six months old when I wrote my Mama, PhD essay. She is now three-and-a-half and a thriving, precocious and imaginative child. She also happens to have multiple, life-threatening food allergies, which has had a big impact on our life, and helps me see all the more clearly why being home with her is right for me. I helped launch a small, allergy-safe co-op preschool group starting this fall, and when she hits kindergarten age I will begin homeschooling her, with the great back-up of my husband Alex, who was named 2009 California Teacher of the Year last winter. Senna now also has a younger brother, Kallan Joseph, who was born in January at home in a beautifully smooth water birth. I had similar third-trimester complications with Kallan’s pregnancy, so once again I was thankful to be working on my own time at home, which I found a lot less stressful than trying to commute and unsuccessfully to negotiate a job-share as I was during my first pregnancy.
“In short, I feel as if everything for me is happening as it should, and I’m thankful for the flexibility I have to make choices about my family and work life. I don’t see myself returning to academia any time in the foreseeable future, although I continue to correspond with many academic friends and, even though I am not officially career counseling anymore, I always answer the emails I still get from PhD students struggling with their career decisions. I’ve also helped a lot of friends with their resumes!”
We’re not surprised–and we’re very happy–to hear Megan sounding so peaceful and content with how she has managed life since leaving academia. You can find out more about Megan and her work at her website,
In Theory/In Practice: On Choosing Children and the Academy
September 9th, 2009Mama, PhD owes its existence in many ways to Literary Mama, the website through which coeditors Caroline and Elrena first met, and Lisa Harper’s contribution, In Theory/In Practice: On Choosing Children and the Academy, also originated in a Literary Mama conversation. Lisa had published an essay in Literary Reflections, the section of Literary Mama that Caroline was editing at the time, and our correspondence about that piece, Flying Home, led us to solicit a contribution for Mama, PhD.
Lisa’s essay appears in the fourth section of the book, Momifesto, in which writers consider changes the academy needs to make to become more family-friendly. Lisa describes her experience facing the academic job market after two years in a visiting professorship and realizing that, in order to have the life she wants–with a family and time for creative nonfiction writing–she needs to leave the “community I had always assumed would be my professional home.” She winds up in an adjunct teaching position, the kind of position that is typically considered the worst kind of temporary work for an academic. As Lisa writes:
“Conventional wisdom has it—and my earlier experience had certainly confirmed—that adjunct faculty serve as second-class citizens on most university campuses. Lower pay, the absence of benefits, the lack of job security, poor course assignments, and overwork are only the most pragmatic problems. Compounding these difficulties, in many institutions, part-timers are largely excluded from the life of the department, from administrative responsibilities (and, therefore, from administrative power), from the intellectual and collegial respect afforded their full-time colleagues, and from the possibilities for career advancement in their own and other institutions.
“But in my new program, I worked with a group of writers, almost all of whom served as adjunct faculty, who seemed genuinely to like one another, and who were happy to be teaching together. Although the practical, financial challenges of adjunct work remained, we also were largely freed from the administrative burdens that took time from the primary pleasures of writing and teaching. As part-timers, we were all equals. As part-timers, it was a given that we had families, occupations—in short, full lives—outside the academy. This fact was respected by all, including the students who had their own demanding lives outside of our program. Contrary to prevailing academic wisdom, here was a program that thrived because of—not in spite of—part-time labor. My colleagues and I talked about pedagogy, supported each others’ book releases, and traded manuscripts. We attended programwide readings and read each semester from our own works in progress. There was a clear, communal sense of purpose and a devotion to the art of teaching that equaled our primary calling to write. It was a rare find and a great freedom to be part of such a community.”
Today, Lisa “is still Adjunct Professor of Writing in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. She continues to juggle writing, teaching, and parenting with varied degrees of success. On some days, she eagerly anticipates September 2010 when her youngest will enter full day kindergarten. On other days, this fact makes her weep.”
You can find out more about Lisa’s projects–one of which is an anthology, coedited with Caroline, about what we eat and why it matters–over at her website.
The Long and Winding Road
September 7th, 2009Jean Kazez’s essay opens the third section of the book, Recovering Academic, and tells the story of her gradual departure from tenure-track teaching after her twins were born. “This was no easy decision,” she writes, “After telling my department head I was interested in adjunct teaching, I felt like a boat cut from its moorings, drifting into the open sea.” But it was necessary for her family, and she found that as an adjunct she could develop and teach new courses that became a stepping stone to a new phase in her career, writing “enjoyable, accessible philosophy” and publishing a book, The Weight of Things.
But despite her real success, Jean’s essay expresses some healthy ambivalence:
“In an ideal world I’d have a full-time job and my writing would earn me a predictable salary and benefits as well as pie-in-the-sky royalties. I wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of depending so heavily on my husband’s income; it wasn’t a problem when I was taking care of our children full time, but now, as the mother of two ten-year-olds who are in school all day, it does feel like an indignity. Have I landed in this spot because the academic workplace is ill adapted to mothers? I don’t think that’s exactly true: I think the academic workplace is ill adapted to everyone.”
Today, Jean reports, “Since I wrote “The Long and Winding Road,” I’ve stopped being the mother of two semi-cuddly 9 year olds and started being the mother of two interesting
12 year olds. Same kids–but what a difference three years makes! I’ve also written a new book, Animalkind: What We Owe to Animals, coming out in February 2010. I’m still teaching part-time at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and still mulling over the whole package–parenting, writing, part-time teaching. Some of that mulling may make it into my next writing project, which is about the philosophical questions we inevitably bump into as parents.”
We’re looking forward to reading more of Jean’s work; in the meantime, you can find out more about Jean and her projects at her blog, In Living Color.
Recovering Academic
September 4th, 2009When Elrena and I first began talking about Mama, PhD, we quickly developed a wish list of contributors, and Jennifer Margulis’ name was on both our lists. We knew she had a PhD; we knew she had a thriving freelance writing and editing career. We didn’t know how she got from one to the other. Her essay, which describes how she falls off the wagon of a life in academia, gives our third section its title: Recovering Academic.
She writes in her essay of weighing her job options:
I thought of a brilliant colleague who moved to Nevada for a tenure track position, and was miserable. And another who worked at a big research university in the middle of Ohio who was also struggling to find her way. I thought of a professor at Emory who never wanted to be in Atlanta, who hadn’t bought a house or an apartment because she felt like her time there was just temporary. Ten years later, tenured, she was still in Atlanta. Instead of living her life, she was waiting to leave. She hadn’t married or had children. My husband, James, and I talked about our options for hours: we decided that we weren’t willing to move somewhere we didn’t want to live just for a job. We made the decision that we would make over and over again: our family, our children, and our quality of life all came ahead of academic success. It was a decision that would soon catapult me out of academia and into a more flexible, child-friendly, and risky career.
Today, Jennifer and her family are thriving. She reports:
“Since spending a year teaching on a Fulbright fellowship–as described in Mama, Ph.D.–I have been completely on the wagon and making a living by writing and editing full-time. I’ve co-authored a book with my husband, The Baby Bonding Book for Dads (visit the book’s blog), which we were working on during our time in West Africa, and I have published articles in a wide variety of major magazines and newspapers since my return. Recent articles include a profile of a Salt Lake City entrepreneur who stared a no-menu no-prices restaurant for More magazine, a 6,000-word piece on the debate about vaccines for Mothering magazine, and a cover story for the November issue of Smithsonian magazine about Niger’s last herd of West African giraffes. I was also profiled in that issue by Smithsonian’s editor-in-chief, Carey Winfrey, and the article, “Looking Up,” was selected for inclusion in BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE WRITING 2009. I’ve also been doing a lot of traveling and travel writing, for both the Oregonian and for Disney’s family.com, and I have recently been on assignment at Crater Lake and in Paris, London, the Big Island, and Kauai. Get links to recent articles, media appearances, and events at my website. Finally, I am expecting my fourth child this November.”
Jennifer’s essay offers an excellent example of a viable out of academia, and she continues to advise writers on developing a freelance career, so visit her website for more information.
One Mamá’s Dispensable Myths and Indispensable Machines
August 31st, 2009In her essay, Angelica Duran writes about the machines that get her, a single mother of two, through her graduate program: the computer on which she wrote; the bicycle which carried her, her books, and sometimes her kids from home to school and back again; the movable library shelves, where her young son quickly learned his letters and numbers, so eager was he to key in the combination that would set the shelves in motion. We’ll never forget the image of her daughter writing encouraging notes – “’Good job, mom!’ or ‘Just 8 more days until you turn in your dissertation’ – and paper-airplaning those ‘love notes’ down the staircase to [her mom].”
Angelica now writes, “Since the book came out, young Jacqueline and Paul have made major steps. Jacqueline is now a freshman at Purdue, majoring in English Education, minoring in Spanish, playing tuba in the (fantastic) Purdue All-American Marching Band, and living in the dorms. Paul is a high school freshman, whose growth spurt leaves me the shortest member of our nuclear family. He takes after his stepfather and me in loving international travel: just last year he traveled with some junior high folk to Italy over spring break for a week, and with his best friend’s family to South Korea for about a month. An Associate Professor, I accepted the nomination to become the Director of Religious Studies. In November, I will be talking about being a Mama, Ph.D. during recent years at the annual National Women’s Studies Conference in Georgia. Husband Sean is busily remodeling our new home — we (environmentally-responsibly) downsized upon Jacqueline’s graduation. It’s actually an older home on our same block. We love our neighbors. We are loving life.”
It’s good to hear things are going so well for this Mamá, PhD!
Enter to win a copy of Mama, PhD!
August 26th, 2009
My friend and fellow mama-writer, one of the most savvy internet book marketing women I know, Christina Katz, is once again running her Writer Mama Back-to-School Giveaway where she gives away one book or magazine subscription every day in September. On September 25th, I’m delighted that Mama, PhD will be included in a trio of anthologies edited by Literary Mama editors Shari MacDonald Strong and Amy Hudock.
Our books — Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life; The Maternal Is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change; and Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined–will be up for giveaway on September 25th. To see a complete list of what you can win, visit Christina’s Writer Mama blog. You can enter every day if you want, so bookmark her site and visit again and again. Good luck!
Coming to Terms at Full Term
August 24th, 2009In September, 2006, Natalie Kertes Weaver submitted her essay, Coming to Terms at Full Term, to be considered for inclusion in Mama, PhD. The essay begins:
On my way back to my office, I ran into a colleague, accompanied by her son, a handsome, six-foot tall, high school senior. She smiled at me and said, “Mine was the size of yours just a blink ago.” “A blink?” I inquired. “One blink,” she nodded. I grinned in return, but the encounter left me unsettled. I wondered how I will feel a few blinks from now, when I am driving my now seventeen-month old boy to his own college visits in preparation for his exodus into adulthood. Will I regret the choice I made to work when he was young? Will I be jealous of the time he spent with others while I was writing or grading or lecturing? Will he understand my reasons? Will I? These are the questions I battle nearly every day, as I remind my husband that he and the baby are my life, and ask him to please take extra care in the car. These are the questions I write about in the journal I keep for my son alongside the record of his first steps, words, and other milestones. These are the questions I struggle with at 4:00 am, when I wake from sleep, restless with thoughts of my own human frailty and mortality.
The essay is one of the shortest in the book, but gets to the heart of the struggles of working mothers in a gentle tone that builds to a conclusion of quiet determination.
We checked in recently with Natalie and learned that she’s been very busy since the book’s publication!
“Most important among the changes in my life is the arrival of our second son, Nathan Augustine, who is now six months old. I also earned tenure and was promoted to associate professor in March 2009. I have, furthermore, finished two books. The first is Marriage and Family: A Christian Theological Foundation (Saint Mary’s Press), which will be available in Sept. 09. The second is an illustrated children’s book, Baby’s First Latin (BookSurge), which will also be available in Sept. 2009. As always, I am thankful for the fullness of my busy life, and I count it all as blessings.”
Congratulations to Natalie, and here’s hoping she can take a well-deserved breather soon.
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