Writer Mother Monster: Special Live Conversation at Stonington Free Library
Writer Mother Monster is a community and conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice. This episode is filmed live at the Stonington Free Library.
Our guest Mary Collins is the author of articles, essays, and three books, including her most recent, A Play Book: Creating Writers, Creating Citizens. She is a professor of nonfiction for the Creative Writing Minors at Central Connecticut State University.
Writer Mother Monster: Megan Stielstra
Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections: Everyone Remain Calm, Once I Was Cool, and The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, the Nonfiction Book of the Year from the Chicago Review of Books. Her work appears in the Best American Essays, New York Times, The Believer, Poets & Writers, Tin House, Longreads, Guernica, LitHub, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A longtime company member with 2nd Story, she has told stories for National Public Radio, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Steppenwolf Theatre, and regularly with the Paper Machete live news magazine at the Green Mill. She teaches creative nonfiction at Northwestern University and is an editor at Northwestern University Press.
Writer Mother Monster is a community and conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice. Each episode is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube, then archived on writermothermonster.com
Hi there! This is Lara Ehrlich, host of Writer Mother Monster, a community and conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice. Each episode is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube, then archived on writermothermonster.com as a video and audio podcast.
This is both a quick intro to the podcast and my pitch for an Audiofemme grant, which provides seed funding to interdisciplinary artists and creators, prioritizing BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities.
Grants are awarded to emerging performing artists across disciplines who are seeking seed funding to create new work and build their platform. Learn more at www.audiofemme.com. And thank you, Audiofemme, for the vital work you do!
#AFAgendaGrant
Writer Mother Monster: Special Episode, Postpartum Psychosis
A panel conversation to illuminate and complicate the issue of postpartum psychosis and depression. Panelists: Chaya Bhuvaneswar, a psychiatrist and author of White Dancing Elephants, who has treated postpartum patients in-hospital, including at a forensic psych ward for women awaiting trial for harming their children. Sharline Chiang, a writer, editor, book coach, publicist, and journalist who wrote, among many other articles, Don’t Call It Baby Blues HYPHEN, the only existing online magazine article on Asian American survivors of postpartum depression. Kathryn Gahl, author of The Yellow Toothbrush, a look at anxiety, depression, OCD, and paranoid thinking through the eyes of a mother whose daughter is experiencing a jail sentence after committing filicide.
Writer Mother Monster is a community and conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice. Each episode is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube, then released as audio wherever you get your podcasts and archived on writermothermonster.com.
Writer Mother Monster: Elizabeth Nunez
Elizabeth Nunez is the award-winning author of a memoir and ten novels, four of them selected as New York Times Editors’ Choices. Anna In-Between won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award and was long-listed for an IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award. Nunez also received the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in nonfiction for Not for Everyday Use; an American Book Award for Bruised Hibiscus; and a NALIS Lifetime Literary Award from the Trinidad and Tobago National Library. Her other novels are: Even in Paradise, Boundaries, Prospero’s Daughter, Beyond the Limbo Silence, Beyond the Limbo Silence, Grace, Discretion, and When Rocks Dance. She is a cofounder of the National Black Writers Conference and executive producer of the CUNY-TV series Black Writers in America. Elizabeth is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, where she teaches courses on fiction writing and Caribbean women writers. She divides her time between Amityville and Brooklyn, New York.
Writer Mother Monster is a community and conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice. Each episode is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube, then archived as a video and released as an audio podcast wherever you get your podcasts. www.writermothermonster.com
Good thing I got up early to write.
Writer Mother Monster: Samantha Silva
SAMANTHA SILVA is an author, playwright, and screenwriter based in Idaho. She’s sold film projects to Paramount, Universal, and New Line Cinema. Mr. Dickens and His Carol, her debut novel, was published by Flatiron Books (2017), followed by Love and Fury: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft (Flatiron Books/2021). She wrote and directed her award- winning short script, THE BIG BURN, which premiered at the Sun Valley Film Festival in 2017. Her work appears in One Story and LitHub.com. Commissioned by Seattle Repertory Theater, she adapted her first novel for the stage; Mr. Dickens and His Carol had its world premiere there in 2022. She describes writer-motherhood in three words as NECESSITY OF INVENTION.
Writer Mother Monster is a community and conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice. Each episode is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube, then archived as a video and audio podcast. www.writermothermonster.com
Writer Mother Monster: Rebecca Makkai
Rebecca Makkai’s last novel, THE GREAT BELIEVERS, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, the Clark Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize; and it was one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2018. Her other books are the novels THE BORROWER and THE HUNDRED-YEAR HOUSE, and the collection MUSIC FOR WARTIME—four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada University and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. Her new novel, I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU, came out in February, 2023. She has 2 kids ages 12 and 15.
Writer Mother Monster is a community and conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice. Each episode is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube, then released as a podcast wherever you get your podcasts and archived on writermothermonster.com
So much for getting up early to write.
Writer Mother Monster: Artress White
Artress Bethany White, associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University, is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is the recipient of the Trio Award for her poetry collection My Afmerica: poems and the essay collection, Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity, which received a 2022 Next Generation Finalist Indie Book Award and is listed as a CLMP social justice read. Her research interests include American slave archives and contemporary African American prose and poetics.
Writer Mother Monster is a community and conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice. Each episode is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube, then archived as a video and audio podcast on www.writermothermonster.com and anywhere you get your podcasts.
Writer Mother Monster: Lisa Czarina Michaud
Lisa Czarina Michaud is an American novelist of Italian-Mexican origins whose work is inspired by her life experiences. In 2009, she followed in the footsteps of her jazz-singing grandmother and moved to France where she currently resides. Her first novel, Slanted and Disenchanted, explores complex relationships between mother and daughter, sexual tension in friendships, the confusion of adulting...and the soundtracks that get us through it all.
Writer Mother Monster is a community and conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice. Each episode is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube, then archived as a video and audio podcast on www.writermothermonster.com and anywhere you listen to your podcasts.
Writer Mother Monster: Caroline Hagood
Caroline Hagood is an Assistant Professor of Literature, Writing and Publishing and Director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. She is the author of the poetry books, Lunatic Speaks (2012) and Making Maxine’s Baby (2015), the book-length essay, Ways of Looking at a Woman (2019), and the novel, Ghosts of America (2021). Her book-length essay Weird Girls is forthcoming in November and her novel Art Monster is forthcoming in March 2023. She describes writer-motherhood in three words as: hybrid effing monster.
Writer Mother Monster is a conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice. Each episode is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube, then archived as a video and audio podcast.
Writer Mother Monster: Anna Hogeland
Anna Hogeland is a psychotherapist in private practice, with an MSW from Smith College School of Social Work and an MFA from UC Irvine. She lives in Vermont. Her essays have appeared in LitHub, Gloss, Big Issue, and elsewhere. The Long Answer, sold in 8 countries to date, is her first novel.
Writer Mother Monster: Yexandra Diaz
Yexandra “Yex” Diaz is a multi-disciplinary artist whose oeuvre is her sobering expression of what it is to exist in a world of resistance, resilience, and revolution during a new era of renaissance rooted in healing. Chicago born and New Haven raised, the polarizing reality of oppression juxtaposed alongside privilege inspires Yex, an Oral Narrator, to employ the art of spoken word as a vehicle for messages that raise awareness around social and environmental injustices. Yex’s style uplifts afro-indigenous culture while evoking radical spiritualism to rewrite the dangerous single narratives which plague stigmatized peoples.
Writer Mother Monster is a conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice as we make space for creative endeavors. Each episode is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube, then archived on writermothermonster.com as a video and audio podcast.
Writer Mother Monster: Sarah M Jasat
Sarah M Jasat grew up believing her family was very strange but later discovered she was Indian. She lives in Leicester, UK, and writes short fiction about the strangeness of family. She dreams about writing a novel for older children if only she could get her own children to go to sleep.
Writer Mother Monster is a conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice as we make space for creative endeavors. Each episode is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube, then archived on writermothermonster.com as a video and audio podcast.
Writer Mother Monster: Lindsay Lerman
Lindsay Lerman is the author of two experimental novels, I’m From Nowhere (2019) and What Are You (2022). She is also a translator. She has a Ph.D. in philosophy and sometimes teaches philosophy and creative writing. Her essays and short stories have been published in LA Review of Books, New York Tyrant, Entropy, and elsewhere. She is working on her third novel and a screenplay.
Writer Mother Monster is a conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice as we make space for creative endeavors. Each episode is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube, then archived on writermothermonster.com as a video and audio podcast.
Writer Mother Monster: Toni McLellan
Toni McLellan is a marketing writer by day and a round-the-clock phrase-gatherer. For two decades, she’s written for major magazines and brands, including a stint as an outdoor family travel writer. She’s also published essays with Outside, KitchenAid, and Fort Collins Magazine. In 2022, Toni started New-to-me Phrases, a weekly newsletter dedicated to curiosity, language, and humor. She lives in a quaint town northwest of Chicago with her husband, their three neurodiverse & queer adult kids, three parrots, a fish named Al Carpone, and a pink axolotl named Mimi.
Writer Mother Monster is a conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice as we make space for creative endeavors. Each episode is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube, then archived as a video and audio podcast on writermothermonster.com.
Writer Mother Monster: Caroline Leavitt
Caroline Leavitt is the NYT Bestselling author of 13 novels, including With or Without You and Cruel Beautiful World. She is also the cofounder of A Mighty Blaze, a blogger/columnist for Psychology Today, and a book critic for People Magazine. A New York Foundation of the Arts Fellow, she was long-listed for the Maine Readers Prize, and was a Sundance Screenwriting Lab finalist.
Writer Mother Monster is a conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice as we make space for creative endeavors. Each episode is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube, then archived on writermothermonster.com as a video and audio podcast.
Writer Mother Monster: Shin Yu Pai
Shin Yu Pai is a poet, essayist and visual artist. She is the author of several books of poetry, including VIRGA, ENSŌ, SIGHTINGS: SELECTED WORKS (2000-2005), AUX ARCS, Adamantine, and Equivalence. She served as the fourth poet laureate of the city of Redmond from 2015 to 2017 and in 2014, she was nominated for a Stranger Genius Award in Literature. She is the creator and host of The Blue Suit, a podcast on Asian American stories, for KUOW, Seattle’s NPR affiliate. She lives with her husband and son in the Pacific Northwest.
Writer Mother Monster is a conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice as we make space for creative endeavors. Each episode is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube, then archived on writermothermonster.com as a video and audio podcast.
Writer Mother Monster: Writing Motherhood & Sex
With Tracey Livesay, Cat Sebastian, and Julie Tieu.
Tracey Livesay’s latest release, Like Lovers Do, was named one of the 100 Best Fiction Books of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews and one of the Top 10 Romances of 2020 by Entertainment Weekly.
Cat Sebastian has written sixteen queer historical romances and her books have received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist.
Julie Tieu is a Chinese American contemporary romance author based in the Los Angeles area. Her debut novel, The Donut Trap, is loosely inspired by the years she spent working at her family's donut shop.
Writer Mother Monster is a conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice as we make space for creative endeavors.
