write with me

Have you always wanted to write your motherhood stories? Do you need a gentle nudge to get you going and keep you accountable? Are you craving a community of women who write? I’m kicking off a 10-week online Motherhood & Words class on January 27th and there are still a couple of openings. What recent students have…

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Hello, 2016!

We rang in the New Year up at my mom’s cabin in northern Minnesota as we so often do. It was cozy—just D, the girls, my mom and step-dad and me. We cooked and ate and read and did puzzles (in an obsessive way that was somehow still relaxing). The girls and D skated in…

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fall motherhood & words class

Donny and I spent the last five days painting (or rather emptying, then taping, then painting, then taping more, then painting more, and finally reassembling) our kitchen and my office. It was grueling, but it’s done, and now my office looks like this: And now I’m ready to dive back into writing and also gear…

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noodling

This morning as I headed out the door for a walk, there was a crispness to the air, a hint of fall. I always feel melancholy as summer winds down, and that’s there—the knowledge that another summer is coming to an end, and that fall, then winter are right around the corner. But mixed in…

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summer and taking stock

I’ve been quiet here these last weeks. Part of the reason is that I’ve been busy. In early June we road-tripped to Winnipeg for a couple of days to see the first U.S. Women’s World Cup game, which was incredible and inspiring. The rest of the month was swallowed up with editing and teaching prep,…

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anthology week: the write on mamas' mamas write

I’m happy to have Joanne Hartman, Mary Hill, and Janine Kovac, the editors of Mamas Write: 29 Tales of Truth, Wit and Grit, here for the final post of anthology week. Mamas Write is an anthology that grew out of the Write On Mamas, an amazing group of (mostly) women writers in the Bay Area.…

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anthology week: kasia james' the milk of female kindness

The second motherhood anthology I’m featuring this week is The Milk of Female Kindness: An Anthology of Honest Motherhood, edited by Kasia James. Kasia is the author of many short stories and science fiction novel The Artemis Effect. She lives in Melbourne, Australia, with a hydrologist, an ankle biter and a big black cat called…

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anthology week: suzi banks baum's an anthology of babes!

One of my favorite things about this work I do here is meeting other women writers who are putting their words out there, creating community and making the world a better place. Today I’m so excited to kick of a week dedicated to a few of these women and their projects. This week I’m featuring…

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Let me count the ways…a love letter to River Teeth

For the past four years, one of the highlights of my spring has been the River Teeth Nonfiction Conference at Ashland University. I’ve written about it here on Motherhood & Words before, and all of those things I lauded in the past still hold true. The conference is small, intimate, and chock-full of talks and…

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when a break is a break

I said I was going to take a two-week break and unplug, and somehow it is four weeks later and I am only now getting around to posting here. Yikes. The good news is that the break was a real break. I packed up the girls and we flew down to Costa Rica, where we spent a week…

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