Welcome to The Village! I’m Kate – an essayist and mother fascinated by the ways we create community in our lives, inspired by those who do it well, and convinced that thriving communities are what make for a joyful world.
The earliest days of my writing career coincided with the earliest days of parenting my youngest child in Japan. My first editorial acceptance arrived via email inbox the same day we brought our newborn daughter home from the hospital, tucked into the security of her car seat amongst fluffy pink blankets. I read the words in awe as my husband navigated the winding highways back to our home, the dusk lengthening along the empty stretch of road. Two dreams were coming true at once, and I wasn’t sure how I would be able to manage both.
My daughter – and that car seat – were my constant coffee shop companions in those first forays into writing. I’d time nursing and naps to maximize the time I could spend focused on words, with her happily dreaming in that seat beneath the table as I wrote against the clock. There were always other demands upon my time, always limits. I dropped my oldest child off at his half-day pre-K and then hustled to the coffee shop, hoping my daughter would sleep for a solid hour so that I could squeeze writing in. The words came – slowly, sometimes, but they always eventually came. The most difficult part, for me, was often making the time.
As my daughter and son grew into toddlers and pre-schoolers, making the time to write became harder and harder amidst the chaos of raising small people and keeping them alive. If I woke up early, trying to rise before the dawn like brilliant writers I admired who were also mothers, my kids would somehow sense it, and pad downstairs in their feety pajamas just as I settled in with my laptop, rubbing their bleary eyes and requesting breakfast. There were no naps, at least not theirs, that I could use productively. By the time they went to bed, I was exhausted, my brain and any creativity already depleted by the challenges of the day – plucking my daughter from the top of the pantry she’d climbed before she leapt down to our hardwood floors, sweeping up the thousands of half-crushed Cheerios my son had accidentally upturned from the box then dashed through, singing and reading and consoling and getting them dressed and undressed and fed and fed and fed again, finding the right cup – no, not that one, the other one, the green one – and yet still, I sat down before a blank page again and again and trudged forward. A paragraph here. An essay there. The building blocks of a career, placed one by one, a belief in myself and my work and that someday, all the work and sleepless nights and tears and frustrations would pay off.
It's hard, to create art, and it is hard to raise people. Doing both, at the same time, can often feel impossible. In this first issue of The Village, I wanted to highlight an organization supporting parents who are writers through balancing caring for the people and the art that you love – the incredible Pen Parentis.
Founded by writer M.M. DeVoe, Pen Parentis is a non-profit literary organization providing support to writers who are parents through those early, difficult days of trying to manage all your dreams at once. With fellowships, literary salons, accountability groups, and more, their goal is to make it possible for writers to write as they navigate parenthood.
M.M. was kind enough to answer questions about the organization and its important role in giving parents the community they need to thrive – whether that support is time, monetary, or simply the belief that the work you are doing is important, and surrounding yourself with others who believe in you, too.
Writing and publishing can be challenging careers at the best of times. What makes writing with kids - especially writing with young children - so uniquely difficult?
The fact is that parenting is 24/7 and so is an artistic career. Even if you have the perfect system of daycare and nap times, your toddler might wake up with a fever or the daycare could have a flood. But the same unpredictability lies in a writing career: if you get inspiration for a truly spectacular short story and don’t write it down right then and there, you could lose it! So writers who have kids generally spend their days suffused with guilt; when they are writing they feel they are neglecting their kids, and when they are with their kids, they feel they are neglecting their art. This mental burden does not make it easy to be in the present moment of either parenting or writing, and then the cycle gets even worse! Add to that, that all your single writer friends abandon you when you have a kid (who are we kidding? most of your friends when you have kids are the moms and dads of your kids’ friends. It’s the way of the world) — and you end up with a lot of glum writers who are not very fun parents.
You founded Pen Parentis to help address some of those challenges.
Creating a community of writers who get it and who actually truly want you to write and who are excited also that your kid got a tooth and/or managed to eat something that was not just white food…? It is a beautiful moment when a new member joins an accountability group and has that feeling of “oh my god, these are my people” wash over them.
People in these groups are very aware of the juggled nature of time and energy and money—and yet they manage to move forward in their writing careers. There are novelists, poets, essayists, memoirists, many are even award-winners, and all of them are there to share their moments of doubt and joy; but they also network professionally, sharing resources to help each other’s careers. The struggle is real, but through community, it can be conquered. Many participants also have full-time jobs (not a lot of writing gigs can put your kid through Vassar) and still they are working on their writing. It’s gorgeous. Community is everything.
Imagine: a whole group of people who actually care whether you wrote today — led by a person who isn’t measuring your writing by how much money it is earning, and who knows that sometimes, spending an hour deleting several parts of a single paragraph is more valuable to the novel than writing forty new pages.
Pen Parentis’ mission is to provide critical resources to working writers to help them stay on creative track after starting a family. How did you grow the organization from local beginnings into the network it is today?
Once upon a time, there was a reading series in Lower Manhattan that featured only writers who also happened to have kids. They read from their work and then there was a moderated roundtable discussing how they balanced their time/energy/money to be able to achieve whatever success they had achieved with their writing. People would come to me after reading—famous writers—and say “I wish something like this had existed when my kids were tiny!” and yet nothing actually existed! It was just a reading series! But I self-funded a writing fellowship in 2010 to gauge the responses from a national audience and so many people wrote notes thanking Pen Parentis for making them feel “seen” — that I decided it needed to be a more real “something.” Then came years of deciding what kind of a “something” it would become.
Finally around 2013, a lawyer who attended the Salons offered her firm as a means to apply for a 501c3, pro-bono. It felt like the universe was giving me a gift and pushing me over the edge at the same time.
What kinds of supports have proven most popular or most helpful in sustaining a writing practice for parents who are writers?
While the Fellowship is very helpful to the Fellow (not to mention to the writers who use it as an incentive to dip a toe back into creative writing), and the Salons are very inspiring—the Cycle of Support is for sure the most popular and most helpful program that we offer at Pen Parentis. You pick a time/date that works for you on a weekly basis and you meet a cohort of other writers, and everyone sets goals and then the next week you have to face your peers and be accountable to your own goals. It’s astonishing - everyone who attends consistently always moves ahead in their writing. One of our groups (11am Thursdays Pacific time) is so productive that we have taken to calling them the “Productive Brunch” group - every single person in the group has published since the group started in early 2022. And one of them just landed a huge literary agent for her novel! It’s gorgeous and we are SO proud of them all.
I had the opportunity to join one of your events at AWP in Philadelphia last year - it was a highlight of the trip for me. What kinds of things make Pen Parentis such a welcoming, supportive atmosphere for parents and artists - in nurturing both aspects of our lives?
Well, you’re in a room full of people who totally get what you’re going through. I don’t think you need much more than that to feel welcomed! But also we are intentionally inclusive - one of the things I tell all our volunteers is that every person who walks into the room ought to feel like they belong there. The world needs EVERY voice. I firmly believe that variety is the joy of life, and that connection provides life's meaning. At all Pen Parentis events, I want to see both variety and connections!
What advice do you have for anyone who is looking to find a writing community of their own, or build one?
Find your people!!! I always say to start from what you love. In our case it’s easy: we all love our kids and our writing. But if you are not a parent, then you can start from what it is you love to write (not just what makes you money or what you feel like you “have to” write) or if you’re in a town you love maybe start something in the library or some other place that makes you happy. A café or bar that is super great? It is all about finding the connections and the joy for me. I hope that others can find the same thing!
And last! Who is someone you look to as an inspiration in building and sustaining community?
Carla Du Pree, who founded City Lit in Baltimore, is an endless inspiration — she has so much energy (and yes, she has kids) and she makes everyone feel so right and so welcome at all of her events. NO one is left out. She is amazing.
Thank you, M.M.! If you are a parent who writes, Pen Parentis just might be the community you’re looking for – learn more about their work, upcoming literary salons & their fellowship here and read more of M.M. DeVoe’s work on her website and her Substack here!