mamaphonic the book--review--feedback please
ok i wrote a review of Mamaphonic: Balancing Motherhood and Other Creative Acts for my zine, but I also plan to send it out so PLEASE give me feedback. I am not at all confident in my reviewing skills.
Mamaphonic: Balancing Motherhood and Other Creative Acts
Edited by Bee Lavender and Maia Rossini
I anxiously awaited the release of this book, and as a self-proclaimed Mamaphonic poster child, had desperately wanted to be included. When my submission was rejected, I was disappointed but my enthusiasm for the project remained. I’m pretty sure I was teary-eyed before I even finished reading Bee and Maia’s introduction. “We do not accept the lie that having children kills creativity,” they wrote. “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 children into their art, to strike that balance between the needs of their families and the requirements of the work. I decided to give myself over to this book 100%. No hard feelings.
Scanning the table of contents I was happy to see some familiar names from my own circle-Marrit Ingman, Victoria Law, and Heather Cushman-Dowdee. My heart skipped a beat when I saw Muffy Bolding listed last. I am a fan of her Live Journal and was unsure as to whether I could prevent myself from skipping ahead and reading her essay first. Flipping through the book I was happy to see drawings, photographs, and other art work. Bee and Maia clearly tried to include artists of many trades. Contributors ranged from cartoonists to flamenco dancers, movie critics to screen writers, and rock stars to woodworkers. There were a couple of instances where I thought that quality took a back seat to diversity, but overall, the Mamaphonic collection is unmatched.
Once I read Ayun Halliday’s essay on creating her zine, “The East Village Inky,” I thought to myself, No wonder my essay was rejected. I was pretty sure that I had read this essay or a version of it before, but I was still captivated my Ayun’s story. I love her account of her zine launch party on the roof of her building. She writes, “…I believed in a magical force field that would keep the children from harm, the way I once believed a diaphragm would protect my lady egg from marauding bands of sperm.” Now that Ayun is writing her fourth book, I had to laugh when I read that she boldly invited everyone she knew from the playground to the launch party and then shyly passed out her zine saying, “Oh, it’s just something for you to read on the toilet.”
I loved Lisa Peet’s essay, “The Rudest Muse” from the title alone. She talks about the struggle to maintain the title of artist while knee-deep in motherhood. Her son was her biggest critic at times, and she worried about him thinking her work was a joke. She writes, “I kept what I did to myself, though. Or rather, since no one else in my life took the same degree of pleasure from putting me under the microscope, I found myself keeping my freelance work out of my son’s orbit. Whereas art directors can come up with any number of ways to tell you that you’re not right for their magazine, or that you need to completely revamp a piece, they’re not going to ask “Do you have grey hair in the back, or is that a bald spot?” Her essay evolves to tell how her teenage son actually found out about her work and even helped her with details. It was funny and touching and ultimately inspiring. I found myself fantasizing about what my sons would be like as teenagers and what their reactions would be to my writing.
Heather Cushman-Dowdee’s essay “Collaboration” literally made me want to send my boys off to live with her for a summer. Heather writes about being a graduate student with her daughter in tow, how her alter-ego “Hathor the Cowgoddess” was born, and how her daughter created her own projects alongside Heather in the studio. She writes, “She rarely had anyone tell her what to draw. No one corrected or urged or enhanced her drawings. She was on her own to do what she wanted-to paint, explore, mess up, and destroy as much or as little as she wanted.” This essay is for anyone who thinks rules were made to be broken.
J. Anderson Coats’ “The Means of Production” was a fascinating process piece that detailed what it was like for the author to bring her toddler with her to the library everyday as she did research. Maia Rossini’s interview with the lead singer of Sleater-Kinney (“Singing Things You Can’t Speak”) was a riveting look at the challenges of being a rock star and a mama to a five-pound premie. It also made me love “Sympathy” from the band’s One Beat CD even more. I really loved that Victoria Law’s photo essay included her and her daughter’s different perspectives of the same event.
Muffy Bolding’s piece “Talking Back to My Elders” was worth the wait. Her essay takes the form of quoting literary types and then pointing out the ways in which they were either misguided or visionary. The reader at once gets a feel for Muffy’s extraordinary talent through her use of profanity, poop stories, and pomp. She credits motherhood with making her the artist that she is today and says, “True, it is certainly a much more complicated and difficult path to choose as a writer, fraught with all sorts of untidy pitfalls, like head lice and hemorrhoids, but it does offer a singularly unique outlook on life that’s imply cannot be supplied by all those filthy, unwashed, Marlboro-bumming, Ginsberg-spouting, coffeehouse-loitering, oh-so bohemian trolls you were hanging out with in college.” By the end I was laughing out loud while blowing my nose and wiping away tears.
These essays I have highlighted are the ones that I will no doubt read again and again-to cure my writer’s block, quell my loneliness, or simply entertain me. I also imagine that the essays that don’t necessarily touch me now, may take on more meaning as my career evolves and my children grow. This collection has a little bit of everything and would no doubt be a welcome addition to any creative mama’s book shelf. I believe that Bee and Maia achieved their goal of showing that Motherhood is not the end of creativity, but rather, the beginning.
Mamaphonic: Balancing Motherhood and Other Creative Acts
Edited by Bee Lavender and Maia Rossini
I anxiously awaited the release of this book, and as a self-proclaimed Mamaphonic poster child, had desperately wanted to be included. When my submission was rejected, I was disappointed but my enthusiasm for the project remained. I’m pretty sure I was teary-eyed before I even finished reading Bee and Maia’s introduction. “We do not accept the lie that having children kills creativity,” they wrote. “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 children into their art, to strike that balance between the needs of their families and the requirements of the work. I decided to give myself over to this book 100%. No hard feelings.
Scanning the table of contents I was happy to see some familiar names from my own circle-Marrit Ingman, Victoria Law, and Heather Cushman-Dowdee. My heart skipped a beat when I saw Muffy Bolding listed last. I am a fan of her Live Journal and was unsure as to whether I could prevent myself from skipping ahead and reading her essay first. Flipping through the book I was happy to see drawings, photographs, and other art work. Bee and Maia clearly tried to include artists of many trades. Contributors ranged from cartoonists to flamenco dancers, movie critics to screen writers, and rock stars to woodworkers. There were a couple of instances where I thought that quality took a back seat to diversity, but overall, the Mamaphonic collection is unmatched.
Once I read Ayun Halliday’s essay on creating her zine, “The East Village Inky,” I thought to myself, No wonder my essay was rejected. I was pretty sure that I had read this essay or a version of it before, but I was still captivated my Ayun’s story. I love her account of her zine launch party on the roof of her building. She writes, “…I believed in a magical force field that would keep the children from harm, the way I once believed a diaphragm would protect my lady egg from marauding bands of sperm.” Now that Ayun is writing her fourth book, I had to laugh when I read that she boldly invited everyone she knew from the playground to the launch party and then shyly passed out her zine saying, “Oh, it’s just something for you to read on the toilet.”
I loved Lisa Peet’s essay, “The Rudest Muse” from the title alone. She talks about the struggle to maintain the title of artist while knee-deep in motherhood. Her son was her biggest critic at times, and she worried about him thinking her work was a joke. She writes, “I kept what I did to myself, though. Or rather, since no one else in my life took the same degree of pleasure from putting me under the microscope, I found myself keeping my freelance work out of my son’s orbit. Whereas art directors can come up with any number of ways to tell you that you’re not right for their magazine, or that you need to completely revamp a piece, they’re not going to ask “Do you have grey hair in the back, or is that a bald spot?” Her essay evolves to tell how her teenage son actually found out about her work and even helped her with details. It was funny and touching and ultimately inspiring. I found myself fantasizing about what my sons would be like as teenagers and what their reactions would be to my writing.
Heather Cushman-Dowdee’s essay “Collaboration” literally made me want to send my boys off to live with her for a summer. Heather writes about being a graduate student with her daughter in tow, how her alter-ego “Hathor the Cowgoddess” was born, and how her daughter created her own projects alongside Heather in the studio. She writes, “She rarely had anyone tell her what to draw. No one corrected or urged or enhanced her drawings. She was on her own to do what she wanted-to paint, explore, mess up, and destroy as much or as little as she wanted.” This essay is for anyone who thinks rules were made to be broken.
J. Anderson Coats’ “The Means of Production” was a fascinating process piece that detailed what it was like for the author to bring her toddler with her to the library everyday as she did research. Maia Rossini’s interview with the lead singer of Sleater-Kinney (“Singing Things You Can’t Speak”) was a riveting look at the challenges of being a rock star and a mama to a five-pound premie. It also made me love “Sympathy” from the band’s One Beat CD even more. I really loved that Victoria Law’s photo essay included her and her daughter’s different perspectives of the same event.
Muffy Bolding’s piece “Talking Back to My Elders” was worth the wait. Her essay takes the form of quoting literary types and then pointing out the ways in which they were either misguided or visionary. The reader at once gets a feel for Muffy’s extraordinary talent through her use of profanity, poop stories, and pomp. She credits motherhood with making her the artist that she is today and says, “True, it is certainly a much more complicated and difficult path to choose as a writer, fraught with all sorts of untidy pitfalls, like head lice and hemorrhoids, but it does offer a singularly unique outlook on life that’s imply cannot be supplied by all those filthy, unwashed, Marlboro-bumming, Ginsberg-spouting, coffeehouse-loitering, oh-so bohemian trolls you were hanging out with in college.” By the end I was laughing out loud while blowing my nose and wiping away tears.
These essays I have highlighted are the ones that I will no doubt read again and again-to cure my writer’s block, quell my loneliness, or simply entertain me. I also imagine that the essays that don’t necessarily touch me now, may take on more meaning as my career evolves and my children grow. This collection has a little bit of everything and would no doubt be a welcome addition to any creative mama’s book shelf. I believe that Bee and Maia achieved their goal of showing that Motherhood is not the end of creativity, but rather, the beginning.