2027 Pen Parentis Fellow: To a Year of Making Noise

I won my first writing fellowship, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

Two weeks ago, I was at one of my book clubs. Discussion of the book (Ann Patchett's The Dutch House, 4 stars) had ceased. Snacks, nail polish, and wine bottles in various states of completion littered the folding tables shoved together in the preschool basement. My daughter is in kindergarten now, but I formed my own attachments to this place. And so I keep returning to the basement with its painted cinderblock walls; its miniaturized lockers, tables, and chairs; its industrial kitchen; and a dozen fellow parents, once strangers, now friends.

Gesturing with the splayed claws of a woman who so rarely paints her nails and so desperately does not want to fuck them up, I lamented that I was feeling adrift.

The Sea

My second anniversary of becoming a full-time writer is coming up. I have made a whopping $25 (thank you Teach. Write.), and spent hundreds more on website costs, subscriptions, and submission fees. I have a finished manuscript and another in progress, plus a couple of short stories forthcoming (The Midwest Review and Santa Barbara Literary Journal, thank god).

A friend and I planned to meet to discuss an MFA, if this is really the door we needed to kick down to become “Writers,” if it is worth paying for, if it is worth moving our families for. I contemplated the possibility of returning to my old career, of earning a salary again, and relieving the pressure valve on household finances.

Commit or break. Stay the course or run for the hills.

The fellow parents at the book club were encouraging. “You’ve got this,” they said. “Keep going,” they said. “You’re having a mid-life crisis,” one said, not unkindly, as if it was a mathematical equation.

Mid-life + crisis = me now.

The Call

One week ago, I was scrambling to get my daughter new ballet shoes ahead of her class that evening. So was the rest of the neighborhood. We returned home shoeless, with just enough time to change clothes and go raid the “borrow bins” at the studio.

I had two calls I’d sent to voicemail, assuming them to be in the endless parade of political outreach that marches across my phone. One was. The other was from Pen Parentis:

“I have some good news for you. I think you want to call me back.”

This was probably not the best time to take my first professional call as a writer, but excitement took control of my faculties and would not be told to wait. I hit the green phone icon.

I won the 2027 Pen Parentis Fellowship for New Parents. It comes with a nice cash prize, a year of mentorship, publication of my submitted work, and lots of other perks. As the founder walked me through all that the fellowship included, I said, “Amazing,” and “Awesome,” so many times that I wanted to tell her I did, in fact, know other words.

We talked about my life as a writer and about my short story, a condensed chapter from my novel-in-progress. I submitted it to Pen Parentis after reading Ellen Stearns's winning submission, Cold Comfort, a story so moving told in so few words that I challenged myself to cut my chapter down to bone.

My daughter found me on the phone in my office/her play kitchen. She was wearing leotard, tights, and a confused expression that asked why mom was in such a frenzy. I wrapped up the call, burst into my husband’s office to tell him (and her) the good news, and then we were off to dance class.

Writer. Parent. The order changes by the hour.

The Professor

Having a child put an urgency to my writing projects that I couldn’t seem to muster before. Even in the small windows of free time in the first years of parenthood, while I still had a full-time job, there was a drumbeat that said, “You’d better do this now.”

I have written far more in my years as a parent than I did in the time before. And as I practice more and grow more, I write better and have more to write about. I cannot imagine how I could be a parent and not write. Nor can I fathom the writer I would have been without my daughter.

Kids make you curious and creative. They don’t even have to be your own kids. If you are suffering from writer’s block, pop over to your local playground or swimming pool and observe the worlds that are being built.

My daughter makes me read. She makes me read every day and read out loud and hear the magic of sentences. She makes me play dollhouse and Barbies until my back aches and my brain is exhausted from storytelling. She makes me play “rhyming telephone,” a game she invented with the fortunate side effect of expanding her vocabulary, and forcing me to define words whose meaning I took for granted. She makes me sing and make up songs. She makes me tell her stories of when I was little, or when my mother was little, or my grandmother or great grandmother. She asks questions about the past and questions about the future. She wants to discuss the laws of the universe and learn why things die and why life goes on and on. She makes me compose our life in ways I want to write down, after bedtime, after dropoff, or with her hovering over my laptop as I type. She makes me write in ways she doesn’t yet know, my professor, my muse, my sweet girl.

The Step

I am still pinching myself over winning the fellowship. It does not solve my financial issues or resolve my decision on an MFA. It does not write my next book for me, but it will get a chapter of it published (forthcoming, Dreamers). The beauty I keep seeing in it is that the fellowship is a step on the path of a writer. For a year, I get to stand firmly on that step. I feel the other parents-as-writers hauling me up, and others still below pushing me forward. There is nothing I’d like more than to turn around and offer a hand.

I have a bumper sticker on my car that says, “Quit Work. Make Music.” My husband put it on, but I was the one to quit work. My terrible advice to any parents out there wondering when is the time to make music, my answer is now.

Parenting is the one job you can never quit. Whatever time is left, make as much fucking noise as you can.