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"Noodles and Sauce" by Ingrid Wendt
Essay from established poet and mother of adult children, reassuring a young writer who worries that she will never find time to work.

"On Mothering and Writing" by Rachel Hall
A college instructor considers the reality and difficulty of her life after having a child, particularly compared to the young people she teaches.

"The East Village Inky" by Ayun Halliday
An avant-garde performance artist in a 400 square foot East Village apartment contemplates life with baby, starts a zine, and launches a new career writing books.

"How to Start a Record Company" by Eileen Alden
House label impresario and punk rock mother of two spells out the actual truth of how she does it.

"The Rudest Muse" by Lisa Peet
Illustrator and specialty baker listens to her teenage son and finds new directions for her work.

"To-Do List" by Fiona Thomson
Single mother struggles to find the time necessary to do anything much other than write a to-do list.

"Palma Soleado" by Rosana Cruz
Performing traditional Cuban music leads a young mother back to her own childhood, and to new opportunities.

"Childish Things" by Lori Pfeiffer
A nonfiction writer is diagnosed with a terminal illness during her pregnancy, and asks "if you only had six months to live, what would you write?"

"The Means of Production" by J. Anderson Coats
Medieval scholar, writer, librarian, and teenage mother directly involves her young son in the means of production.

"Two Ways of Seeing" by Victoria Law
Photo essay showing how a mother and child see an event in different and illuminating ways.

"Moviemania Mama" by Marrit Ingman
Movie critic survives colic and loss of hipster status to find a deeper meaning in even the most banal assignments.

"On the Road with Dangerbaby" by Jen Thorpe
Legendary underground band hits the road – with baby.

"Crowning" by Jacey Boggs
Woman discovers that she wants to change the world through woodcarving, one power tool at a time.

"Spaced Out" by Dewi Faulkner
Finding time to write in the middle of managing a psychiatric disorder.

"The Blue Pitcher" by Patricia Kinney
Poet and mother of six talks about the reality of creating work while picking raisins out of the carpet.

"Madre de Baile" by Kristina Jordan Cobarrubia
Flamenco dancer discovers the passion in her dance for the first time as her daughter watches.

"Give Me a Second Please" by Justyna Sempruch
An academic feminist considers the predicament of depending on a husband for financial support, and prepares to conduct a cross-cultural parenting study.

"Letters to Aisha" by Laura Fokkena
Essayist remembers a poet she knew in Egypt, and ponders the fact that not all mothers raise their children.

"Stones and Spoons" by Beth Lucht
Rebuking the myth of madness, one writer wonders why we are offered role models who commit suicide.

"2567 Miles" by Lli Wilburn
Illustrated travel diary.

"A Fire Well Kept" by Katie Kaput
Transgendered teenage couple decides to have a child, and discusses how the birth of the baby changed their way of looking at the art they create.

"Don’t Forget the Lunches" by Monica Bock and Zofia Burr
Notes and illustrations from a series of multi-media pieces and gallery shows using the by-products of family life to speak to a larger predicament.

"Our (Publishing) House" by Gayle Brandeis
Celebrated novelist and mother of two describes how her children reacted to her work as she published and promoted her books.

Corin Tucker Interview by Maia Rossini
An interview with the lead singer of the critically acclaimed band Sleater-Kinney, in which Tucker talks about how she balances being a rock star and a new mother.

"Collaboration" by Heather Cushman-Dowdee
A visual artist describes how she completed her MFA with the baby in the studio.

"Italian Suite" by Rose Adams
A selection of poems and accompanying illustrations about one mother’s trip to Italy with her young son.

"Talking Back to my Elders" by Muffy Bolding
Humorous and irreverent piece in which the writer responds to a series of quotations from famous mothers and artists about motherhood.

"Afterword" by Bee Lavender
Description of the complicated relationship between art, activism, and raising kids – with a young girl leading the way.

Do you have a toddler seat strapped in the back of the tour van? Do you write poetry while the baby naps? Have you discovered that becoming a mother has changed not only your daily life but the content of your creative work? Mamaphonic is an anthology about mothering and the creative process. The book includes confessions and conversations about the true, exhilarating, entertaining, and difficult aspects of remaining creative while raising kids. It’s a smart, sexy, alternately funny and heartbreaking look at balancing art and motherhood, told in the artists’ own words.

Bee Lavender is the 32 year old mother of two children (one a teenager). Currently writing a book about radical education, she is also the co-editor of two books, Breeder: Real Life Stories from the New Generation of Mothers and the upcoming Mamaphonic. She is the publisher of the online edition of Hip Mama. She also created and publishes Girl-Mom, an advocacy site for teen parents, and Yo Mama Says, a news and commentary site for activists.
Her writing appears in various periodicals and several anthologies including the upcoming Pills Thrills Chills and Heartache and Without a Net. Bee has been interviewed by and reviewed extensively in both mainstream and underground publications. Born and raised on the Kitsap peninsula, Bee has lived in the Pacific Northwest her entire life. After surviving a rare genetic disorder and childhood cancer, she became a parent in her teens. Her daughter was four years old when Bee completed a masters degree in public administration. She has worked as a policy analyst, a civil rights consultant, and staffed public advisory boards. She has developed nonprofit organizations and served on the board of directors of several institutions.

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Maia Rossini lives with her husband Ryan Kelly, and their young son Thelonious Spike, in Rifton, NY. She is the executive producer of Mamaphonic.com and a producer and editor at Hipmama.com. She received her MFA in creative writing from the New School University in 1998. Her work has been published in such places as Prima Materia, Rag, and Hip Mama.

Check out our events page for details on the author tour...

Introduction

By Bee Lavender and Maia Rossini

The story of editing this book is a story that all mothers who are artists already know by heart. It is a story about hiding out in a room while a child calls out for assistance, answering back, Just one more minute! while we try to finish reading another essay. It is a story of starts and stops, of catching time, forcing time, making time whenever we could get it. Sitting in a car, waiting for school to let out, frantically scribbling something on the back of an envelope before the kids descend. Compromise, planning, and hard work.
We know this story, we live this story, we sit over tea and coffee, watching our children, and worrying this story, shaking it out, smoothing it down, telling it over and over with all the other mothers we know.

How do you do it? we ask each other. Do you think we’ll ever do it again? Is it worth it? Is it possible? Is it better? Is it worse? Will we ever have the time, the brains, the skill, the will, to do it the way it should be done?

We collect other mothers in our minds – mothers who have published books, mothers who have opened shows, mothers who sell their art, mothers who act in movies, mothers who sell millions of records, mothers who go on the road.

We repeat their names like a prayer: Diane di Prima, George Sand, Kristen Hersh, Erma Bombeck, Mary Wollstonecraft, Patti Smith, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Ursula Le Guin, Muriel Rukesyer, Diane Arbus, Maya Angelou, Lorrie Moore, Louise Nevelson, Sally Mann, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Exene Cervenka, Kim Gordon, Bjork, Sinead O'Connor.
We think of Shirley Jackson writing "The Lottery" in her head as she pushed a pram to the market. We think of Jean Kerr editing "Please Don't Eat the Daisies" in her office-- a car parked one block from the family home. We think of Betty MacDonald dreaming up her next bestseller from a bed in a tuberculosis asylum. We look for examples from history of women who did not have our advantages growing up after the massive educational and cultural reforms rendered by second wave feminism.

We see ourselves in the words of Angela Carter when she writes "there are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you're faced with somebody whose needs won't be put off."

We are respectfully amazed by the example of the Carter Family transmitting a musical legacy across generations of strong women. We scan magazines looking for contemporary examples of powerful, successful female artists and find Yoko Ono, who lost one child in a custody dispute and raised another on her own after her husband was murdered. We see ourselves when she says "work is something I love, and is what comes naturally to me. Business is harder. Motherhood is extremely complicated and difficult, though I suppose some mothers would say it's as natural as breathing."

We worry about the fact that many of our role models succumbed to addiction, mental illness, suicide. We laugh out loud when we hear the refrain of a Freakwater song that goes "It’s not hard to have a little baby / And I won’t have far to go when I go crazy."
We hold these examples in our minds when our own lives get too slippery, when we have no space or time to pursue our work separate from the demands of our children. Somehow they did it, we think. So we can do it, too.

This book is a response to the question How do they do it? This book started from a practical place, in conversations with other women. The women we know want inspiration but they have pragmatic concerns: how to find a good printer, where to find a grad program with decent daycare, navigating agents and gallery representation, how to keep the kids out of the expensive art supplies, how to negotiate time with their parenting partners, or, often, how to negotiate time when there is no parenting partner.

The women we know proudly talk about involving their children in their art, and are not afraid to say that sometimes they need absolute solitude as well. These women insist on a room of their own, even if it’s simply a bedroom with a door that shuts or a space created out of hung blankets, a cushion on the floor, and a serious demand for an hour or two to themselves.

The women we know have a palpable need for community. They know the theory, they already practice the work. They need something else – examples from history, peers in their chosen fields, the kinds of resources and networks that come with belonging to a guild or benevolent society.

This book starts with the premise that people require practical models. We acknowledge that women’s work often happens outside of the accepted history. We refute the lie that having children kills creativity. In fact, we assert that people who are raising kids have to be more creative to find enough time to do their work, to figure out ways to integrate their children into their art, to strike that balance between the needs of their families and the requirements of their work.

The nucleus of this anthology started on the road, when Bee did readings around the country. Countless women asked "how do you do it?" and seemed to need more than just the brief and idiosyncratic account of one mother. They needed examples from all sorts of mothers and artists. When Maia did a reading at her local bookstore, this project was briefly mentioned in her introduction. After the reading, she was surrounded by a knot of women and none of them had anything to say about her story. They wanted to know about Mamaphonic. When is it coming out? Are you still taking submissions? I’m so glad someone is finally putting something like this together!

When we decided to do this book we knew there would be a strong reaction. We knew that the topic of balancing motherhood with an artistic career was one that women had a lot to talk about. But even with those kinds of expectations, we were overwhelmed by the response. With a very limited call for submissions, mainly based on forwarded email and word of mouth, we received over 400 essays.

This book tells the truth about the way we live. The words we have said. Every single essay made us nod in agreement; every single essay told an important story of women who actively and consciously choose to be both mothers and artists. There were compromises of vision, of time, of careers. There were missed opportunities, grief, perseverance, transcendence, and pleasure.

We hope that new mothers will read stories like Ingrid Wendt’s and Lisa Peet’s, women who have been balancing their work and their children for years, and see that things happen in cycles, that they will get through those intense early years and have time to work again. We hope that mothers whose children have already grown up and left their houses will read work like J. Anderson Coat’s or Rachel Hall’s and have those early years reawakened in their memories, that some inspiration will be jogged, that they will think about what they learned. Ayun Halliday and Jen Thorpe remind us that there is no reason we can’t change the rules and make not just creative work but a creatively organized career. In fact, we are entitled; we are after all mothers.

Our own children informed each page of this book. They were constantly present in the process, asking for a glass of water, help getting their shirt buttoned, a ride, a movie. They leaned against our shoulders demanding that it was their turn at the computer, asking, Mom, aren’t you done yet? When can we play? There is no doubt that they made this process longer and harder than it might have been otherwise. But without them, this book simply wouldn’t exist.

Motherhood might slow down art. Children might interrupt those moments of concentration. But we flatly refuse to agree with the idea that becoming a mother is the end. Because it’s not. It’s the beginning.