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978-0-7735-3377-6 April 2008
Writing a book is a little like raising a child. First, there's a period of gestation, a heady time when all seems possible. Then comes the hard work and eventually, much later, the letting go.
In Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood, 25 Canadian women explore how they have managed to succeed as what the B.C.-based editors of this collection call "writer-mothers." The voices here are disparate; they include lesbian and aboriginal women, as well as adoptive mothers and mothers of special-needs children.
What these women share is the struggle to find a balance and keep writing, despite their children's sometimes overwhelming needs.
B.C. writer Luanne Armstrong recalls how, after the birth of her twin daughters, her grandmother told her: "Your life is over now. You must live for your children."
She balked at this and, despite the dissolution of two marriages, managed to carve out writing time. "I practised writing," she says, "in the bits and pieces and cracks and fractures of my life."
In her assertion that writer-mothers can "do it all," Montreal's Denise Roig suggests how difficult and tiring this juggling act can be. "We can do it all — write a poem and do math homework and approach agents and do Girl Guides and book tours and Christmas cookies for the teachers and final edits and try to make a living from teaching writing and negotiate sleepovers and sit at the computer waiting for things to come."
Vancouver writer Deirdre Maultsaid uses one-word sentences to capture the relentless demands of motherhood: "I. Am. So. Busy. Trying. To. Keep. Their. Hands. Clean. And. Keep. Them. From. Falling. Off. The. Cliff."
New mothers have it hardest. After her daughter's birth, Montreal poet Stephanie Bolster feared she would never be lucid again, let alone write."
And yet all the women in this book managed to find their way back to writing. Some, like Montreal poet Robyn Sarah, credit giving birth and raising children with helping them find their voices.
Interestingly, too, several of the writer-mothers here credit writing with making them better mothers. Theresa Shea of Edmonton explains: "I parent better when I'm writing, because then I don't feel like I'm 'just a mother.' "
The most touching essay is by Sharron Proulx-Turner, a Calgary writer and survivor of childhood abuse. Mothering, she says, "is time-consuming, and, like a waist-length french braid, requires patience and calm."
This collection should especially be read by new mothers — and fathers — who hope to continue or begin writing professionally. Words like these, from Vancouver writer Rachel Rose, will encourage writer-parents to soldier on: "Your muse may flee, but it is unlikely to be a permanent departure. Wait for her."
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