Welcome back to your Daily Crumbs: Weekly!
I’m particularly excited about the reads and links I’m sharing this week, if only because they made me think, feel, and forget (grief, pain, and the two floods in my living room and office, among other things).
This will be my last week sending the Crumbs before the Holidays — I’m still working on my Fall essay on the Writer’s Log, hoping to deliver it before the winter solstice.
Next week will be charged, as I am heading to Canada for my stepdad’s funeral. Words are no longer stuck in my throat, and his presence infuses my dreams, writing, and various practices (teaching and yoga, among others). I like to think it’s a way like any other to still spend time in each other’s company.
This week’s Crumbs… are mainly about womanhood and writing. You know… universal stuff.
I hope you enjoy.
“Writing ‘Women of a Certain Age.’ A Roundtable on Crafting Older Female Characters in Fiction”:
It doesn’t seem fair, somehow, that older men are considered “distinguished,” while women are deemed “of a certain age.” In a number of my books, the younger female protagonist has a counterpart in an older female character, usually one with a juicy secret or two. They might have health issues that should’ve knocked them down, but didn’t, and they might be fiery but are never bitter.
Damn right.
Amanda Montei always hits the nail on the head but this particular piece really moved me:
Women make up the majority of adjunct positions.
The motherhood penalty frequently converges with the tenure track (a set of professional and intellectual steps new full-time faculty members must complete to get tenure, notoriously designed for men with wives), kicking women off that track during childbearing years—this is in large part due to how the productivity-centered track is structured and it’s absence of flexibility for women who bear children. But even for women without kids, maternal expectations are everywhere: it’s harder for women to say no to free and emotional labor in the academy, workplace climates often push women out. For mothers of color, there are many added challenges, not least of which is the expectation that scholars of color take on more unpaid diversity and inclusion work.
I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with accepting my fate in such a system.
Someone told me a couple of weeks ago that self-translation was a no no and it sent me spiraled down into a well of doubts.
This post (“Bilingual Writers, (Self-)Translation and the Stylistic Revolution”) by Arianna Dagnino provided many insights and critical paths I’d like to investigate :
Bilingualism and self-translation may be used to question or redefine one’s cultural identity and to dislocate and decentralize contextual dominant idioms. I stress the word contextual because idioms become dominant depending on the context in which they are actively practiced and pursued.
I wrote my second book of poems all in English, then translated them in French to get them published. I’m now re-translating them in English (I completed the translation last week and letting them “sleep” until the New Year before I begin revising the manuscript and sending the poems to various journals.
I (now) find no shame in taking care of my own creative practice, which includes self-translating and promoting my work the way I see it fit.
Writing this book was an act of love. So is its translation.
I simply do not get tired of these articles: “When Women Artists Choose Mothering Over Making Work”.
The process of creation is not always visible to outsiders, nor does it always have tangible yields.
But it’s there. It’s always — and forever will be — there.
An amazingly well written, exhaustively researched, and heartfelt article about motherhood, dread, and joy. I felt replenished.
When I started asking women about their experiences as mothers, I was startled by the number who sheepishly admitted, and only after being pressed, that they had pretty equitable arrangements with their partners, and even loved being moms, but were unlikely to say any of that publicly. Doing so could seem insensitive to those whose experiences were not as positive, or those in more frustrating relationships. Some also worried that betraying too much enthusiasm for child-rearing could ossify essentialist tropes or detract from larger feminist goals.
But that conscientiousness — and occasional pessimism — is giving motherhood short shrift.
Somewhere on the other side of the spectrum, Maggie Smith wrote an article, “Never Rely on a Man’s Money”, in Modern Love about her post-divorce life and I’m taking note — no, I’m not getting one. Yes, I rely on the voices and (again, louder) universal wisdom of women I admire.
After my divorce, my friend Kelly asked, “What’s your top priority now in one word?”
I answered immediately: “Autonomy. What about you?” She and her son’s father had divorced years earlier.
“Community,” she said.
We laughed about how these feel like opposite impulses — one for care and connection, the other for self-sustenance and independence. But they’re not opposite at all. One can be deeply connected to their community and have close relationships with others, but also remain self-sustaining. I believe this.
BONUS
This tweet made my week.
LATE 1900’s!!! I’m screaming.
Have a lovely, lovely week folks.
Talk to you very soon. xx.