My Writing Process

My good friend, Kate Hopper, has invited me to participate in this fun little blog tour about writing process. Kate is a brilliant writer and teacher who has published two books you might be interested in: Ready for Air: A Journey through Premature Motherhood and Use Your Words: A Writing Guide for Mothers. She has taught at the River Teeth Nonfiction Conference since its inception, and that's how I've gotten to know her. She is fun, thoughtful, and passionate, and I just love reading her stuff and getting to chat with her!

So, here's a little bit about my writing process:

1) What am I working on?
I am currently shaping and straightening, like a hairdo, a collection of essays-in-memoir about my relationship with my dad and my relationship with my husband. It travels from youth through adolescence and then takes a hop, skip, and jump into the tenth year of marriage. The essays wrestle with body image, temptation, love, romance, obsession, faith, self-confidence, transitions from father's daughter to husband's wife, role reversal, the objectification of women, and parenting. And everything else I can jam in, too. The collection is tentatively titled, American Honey. This is the primary focus of my writing world right now, although I have sent out some poems here and there, just for fun.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?
A lot of my material is rooted in faith and in doubt, wrestling between the two, and even though God might not come up directly in essays, underneath the surface he's always there. Like many essayists, I write to know more and to ask questions about what I think I know already or hope to know soon. I try to achieve what in yoga my friend, Jody, calls being "rooted and reaching" - my feet are generally planted firmly in the practical details of life while my hands are reaching upward and outward, seeking meaning beyond the physical world.

3) Why do I write what I do?
I write what I do because it is what feels most urgent right now, and I don't know of many books in which marriages survive. I wanted to write a marriage memoir that shows the nitty-gritty details of daily life, with all its challenges and compromises and promises, in the midst of living. Most marriage memoirs I know, the spouse either leaves or dies. In case you don't know yet, I am still happily married to my husband, and both of us aren't dead yet. The funny thing about trying to write these essays is that my dad kept appearing, and I decided to let that thread develop in my writing, to follow where Dad led me. This turned out to be a good idea. I have learned so much about myself and my marriage and my husband and my father by following the flitting butterfly through the field.

4) How does my writing process work?
I tend to write blathering first drafts that are horrible and ugly and resemble the title of my blog, "And so" first drafts. The lovely thing about these first drafts is that often one essay actually contains two... or more... essays that can be yanked out and shaped until they look more like something someone might want to read someday. I jam writing time into the crevices of the day - I am writing this on my lunch break while my husband plays basketball and my son takes a nap - or in the evenings after the kids are asleep. Sometimes, if a thought is really nagging on me, I'll carry my laptop around the house from task to task. It sits on the dryer while I fold laundry. It sits on the counter while I chop carrots. I usually work on more than one essay at a time because I'm thinking about more than one thing at a time. Lately it's all nonfiction, but maybe someday I'll write a poem again.

Next Up!
Here are three ladies you should get to know. They will post their blog tour replies next Monday, but check them out now!

Sonya Huber - I met Sonya through the Ashland MFA Program when she taught for us, and I adore her passion, her laugh, and her compassion for others. She is a lovely writer and a lovely person. http://sonyahuber.com/

Callie Feyen - Callie and I are social media pals. I've never met Callie in person but we've exchanged packets of writing together for over a year, and her blogs about parenting are just phenomenal. http://www.calliefeyen.com/

Yankee Drawl - Jayna and I have known each other since high school. She blogs about parenting three little people, and I think she is hilarious. http://www.yankeedrawl.com/

Why Do We Need Men?

So there's news flitting about that women are increasingly the leading or sole breadwinners in the American family.  In most cases, this means more and more families are being raised by a single mom with an absent father, or the reason mom is the breadwinner is because dad can't find work. 

It isn't because a couple sat down together and reviewed their financial and family plan to assess what the best scenario might look like for their family.  That is what we did back in 2007; we looked at my job prospects and our growing family, our move to a new city, and we said, let's see if this can work.  It did, with bumps and bruises, just like every new adjustment.  We know other couples who have made similar decisions and have made it work, and made it work well.

That isn't what we're talking about here, though.  Not many are celebrating this shift as a strong, positive, changing tide in family dynamics.  Kathleen Parker in her Washington Post article "The new f-word: Father," Fox News anchors (all flabbergasted males), and the MSNBC "Morning Joe" edition (almost all successful females stumbling about for a good answer to the "why men?" question) all discuss this trend toward women as sole or primary breadwinner, and none of them think it's a good thing.
 

The study spawns one of the strangest questions I can think of to be taken seriously by the general public, "Why do we need men?"

If a woman can earn a degree, work hard, carry a child, mow the lawn, take out the trash, prepare meals, and change a diaper all on her own, why bother with a man, who simply complicates life with his dirty clothes, smells up the place with his burping and farting, and adds another person to worry over and provide for?  Obviously all men are good for is sperm.  After impregnation, we can take it from there.

Why do we need men?  Why are we asking this question?  Why do we need women, when we can grow babies in test-tubes?  The necessity of an entire gender of a species is obvious.  What we're really asking is, "Where are the good men?"
 

Good men, whether stay-at-home fathers or sole breadwinners, love and support their wives, whether they stay-at-home or go-to-work or some combination of those tasks.  Good men teach boys how to be men.  Good men show girls what a good man looks like.  A good man leads when a good woman doesn't know what to do or where to go; a good man communicates with his spouse when he doesn't know what to do or where to go.  Good men (and women) lift up when the other falls down. 

We need good men for the great pleasure of building a family and a life with another person.  We need good men because men are at their core different from women, and women are at their core different from men, and these differences (whether traditional or non-traditional in their manifestations) provide balance, beauty, and character refinement.

Society is shouting, "We need good men!"

How do you make good men?  You raise good men. And if there isn't a good man in your life to help you do that, you find other good men to stand in that role as best as they can.  Good men must help other men to make men out of their men so that they can raise up good men, too.  We cannot complain about there being no good men out there if good men don't step in to make men good.

Stop asking "Why do we need men?" - that is not the question.  It should never be the question.  Substitute in any demographic and the question sounds preposterous, derogatory, and dangerous.  That question, when extended to its scariest places, devalues an entire population of our society. 

We need each and every kind of person to strive to be the best versions of themselves.  Let's stop asking dumb questions and start making good answers.