metaphor

In the days leading up to the writing workshop, as I planned and packed (and wasted time worrying about how I would be away from the nursing baby for a week), I envisioned the chance to spend a week writing as a world apart from parenting. No requests for snacks, no cries for milk, no laundry to fold, no meals to prepare. For a few precious days I would get to be a Writer, not a mother-who-occasionally-writes. How wrong I was. Because not only was my writing shot through with my children and my identity as a mother, and not only did others around the table bring poignant and painful reflections on their own roles as parents, but the very craft of writing we worked to hone returned us time and time again to the early years of the parent-child relationship. In the book we used for the course, Words That Sing: Composing Lyrical Prose, our teacher Mary explained how our basic sense of rhythm, the cadence that carries our sentences, was set by our mother's heartbeat: the steady … [Read more...] about rhythm, metaphor, and mama’s heartbeat