AWP was amazing and exhausting. When D and the girls picked me up at the airport Saturday night, I squeezed myself in back between Stella and Zoë, and I gave Stella a huge hug, kissing her repeatedly. She went on and on with “Mama, I missed you,” and “I love you,” and “I’m so glad…
Read MoreI slept for six and a half hours straight last night! Heavenly. I wish I could have slept even more, but I had to get up and pump. I’ve been pumping and pumping and pumping, which, I’ll admit, has surprised me. I knew still Zoë nursed a lot at night, but I didn’t realize how…
Read MoreHey, we’re reporting from AWP (and by “we” I mean me and the Medela Pump n’ Style–more about that later). I’ll give you an update on the panel later, as well. It was so fun! But I wanted to let you know that I’m also over at nytimes.com as a guest blogger on motherlode today.…
Read MoreAWP is only five days away, and I’ve been thinking of little else. It’s not just the writing conference that’s on my mind, of course. I’ve been thinking about getting on a plane alone, without anyone I need to hold or rock or calm. I’ve been thinking about sleeping through the night and having three…
Read MoreA number of times a day I have a thought followed by, oh, this will make a good blog post. I walk through the day writing paragraphs in my head. Some of these paragraphs are very good. Some are not. Regardless, by the time I get the kids to bed (especially when D is gone,…
Read MoreI’ve been in such a funk this summer, which is unlike me because I love summer. I love the green and the heat (within reason) and the long days. But the days have been so very long with the two girls, and I’m always scrambling to squeeze in one more thing. I have been taking…
Read MoreI’ve been thinking a lot about narrative urgency the last couple of weeks because I recently went to see Charles Baxter talk about and read from his new novel, The Soul Thief. (I dragged both Stella and Zoe out in the cold so I could get my literary fix.) He used the term narrative urgency,…
Read MoreZoe is 4 weeks old today, which seems impossible. How have four weeks already passed? How have four weeks of me doing nothing but nursing and bouncing a baby just disappeared? These are hard times for me. I started to feel more like myself at the end of last week—the scary hormone visions (more on…
Read MoreA few weeks ago, I wrote about dialogue and posted excerpts from two writers whom I think do dialogue exceptionally well: Yusef Komunyakaa and Cheryl Strayed. But then I went on to say that Cheryl Strayed was an unlikable narrator, and Cheryl Strayed actually read the post. I hurt Cheryl’s feelings, and that wasn’t my…
Read MoreI’m sure some of you have already read Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française. For those of you who have not, you must go out and get it. Némirovsky was a Russian Jew who had lived in Paris for twenty years by the time the Nazis invaded France. She was a successful novelist and mother to two…
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