What She Said: Claire Messud

'“Of course, you wrote that for the money,” even a few good friends told Messud, assuming she’d finally taken Hitchens’s advice (or maybe followed her husband’s haute-populist prescriptions). In fact, she says, those short chapters and quippy sentences were all she could manage between feedings of her infants. “I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play,” she says. “It was like a book by somebody else. The idea that there was any plan or strategy—” Well, she did try something new. “I had never been very interested in plot,” she says. “I felt I should practice drawing hands.” But gone were the days when she went over her sentences so many times that she memorized them. “It’s actually a good thing not to be able to recite every last line,” she says. “Lighten up a little!”'

Claire Messud on the writing of The Emperor's Children in an interview with Boris Kachka in http://www.vulture.com/2013/04/claire-messud-and-james-wood-on-the-woman-upstairs.html

What She Said: Anne Enright

"My children dictate my schedule--I have done vast amounts since they were born because they keep me from my desk and make me impatient to get back to it. I don't count words so much anymore, or note beginnings and endings. I work on several things at once, so there is always a file open and no such thing as a blank page. I like working. What discipline I have comes from the fact that I don't do any of the other things I am supposed to. Housework, personal administration--everything goes to hell. My husband cooks. We don't starve."

Anne Enright in The Secret Miracle: The Novelist's Handbook.

What She Said: Doris Lessing

"I often think how my life would have been different if I’d done other things; because the thing that shaped my life is that I had a child. So that means that you’re not very mobile. And it had good or bad sides to it. The bad side was that I didn’t live in Paris or New York, which I would have liked to have done for a bit. The good thing was that because a child was such a discipline I did not get part of this very attractive life in the clubs in Soho. Which I wouldn’t have survived, believe me. Because it was enormously exciting. You musn’t judge it by the Groucho or something like that. It was full of flamboyant characters, all of them alcoholics, all of them very witty."

from a 2005 interview with The Reader Online

What She Said: Lynda Barry

"The same thing with writing or anything that we call the arts: there's this idea that they're just an elective, they're just decoration and they have nothing to do with our survival...or why we're here....That's the reason why I made it to 53 is because of finding these things that poetry or paintings or plays contain, that's the stuff of mental health. And we ignore it at our peril."

Lynda Barry in an interview at The Poetry Foundation that's been making the rounds on social media sites this past week. I can't stop watching it.

What She Said: Toni Morrison

"I was young. I started writing when I was 39. That's the height of life. The real liberation was the kids, because their needs were simple. One, they needed me to be competent. Two, they wanted me to have a sense of humour. And three, they wanted me to be an adult. No one else asked that of me. Not in the workplace – where sometimes they'd want you to be feminine, or dominant, or cute." She smiles. "The kids didn't care if I did my hair, didn't care what I looked like."

Toni Morrison, from an interview at The Guardian.

What She Said: Stephaine Pearl-McPhee

"Writer is not a synonym for stay-at-home parent."

and

"Every writer/parent I know does a huge chunk of their writing after the kids have gone to bed, working into the wee quiet hours, and then staggers through their day with the kids. The ability to use what flexibility the job granted me was amazing – but the difficulty of having that work respected, and protecting the time to do it was almost impossible. I know I’m not the only writer fantasizing about a world where every day they went to a small room that their kids weren’t allowed in, and worked without interruption. Being a working writer who has a child or three, and who can’t afford or doesn’t choose childcare means that parent/writer is actually doing two jobs at once, with both being disrupted by the effort. Like someone working outside the home who has to leave their kids to get it done, the writing gets interrupted by the parenting, and the parenting gets interrupted by the writing and the writer struggles to find some kind of balance."

From the Yarn Harlot's guest post at Dispatches from Utopia. Lots of great stuff there--go check it out.

What She Said: Mary McNamara

"So here's the answer: It's very difficult. But so is losing 30 pounds or learning French or growing your own vegetables or training for a marathon or any of the many other things working parents often manage to pull off. While it's tempting to keep the idea of writing wrapped up in a glittery gauze of muse-directed creativity, it's just another sort of work, one that requires dedication, commitment, time and the necessary tools."

Found via bookninja, Mary McNamara's list to help literary mamas write that novel at the LA Times.

What She Said: Kathleen Winter

"Women's timelines...they're different from men's timelines. Still."

On one of the reasons why she didn't write for ten years, from this interview on CBC's The Next Chapter.

What She Said: Mavis Gallant

For now, suffice to say that she's never wanted to remarry after a brief wartime union ended in divorce. “I didn't want that life. I wouldn't have been able to write.” Nor did she long for children. “You don't miss what you've never had. ... I would have made a good grandmother but I don't think I would have made a good mother.” She chuckles. “I might have run away!”

From an interview with the Globe and Mail, posted on their blog in April, 2009.

What She Said: Karen Houle

"I wish a living could be earned by parenting. I am skilled at it, and it's a chosen profession, and I enjoy it as much as writing or teaching. But as it is, to become an Executive Parent I would still need a Sugar Daddy."

from Karen Houle's interview with rob mclennan.