The Imprint of a Mind: Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra
This sparse book, “an essay on pregnancy and earthquakes,” deals with the author’s dueling fears of recent and future earthquakes and her impending childbirth.
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Posts Tagged: Little Labors
The Fractures of Motherhood: Julia Fine’s The Upstairs House
Like Fine’s uniquely constructed book, being a mom is to be permanently fractured.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #205: Beth Alvarado
“For me, when I write nonfiction, my mind moves from the outside to the inside.”
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What to Read When You Want to Write Like a Mother
A list of books that wrangle, directly or indirectly, with motherhood and all that comes with it (or its absence).
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The Rumpus Interview with Belle Boggs
Belle Boggs discusses The Art of Waiting about navigating through the difficulties of conception and fertility treatment.
...moreBaby as Muse
Lucy Ives writes about Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors for the Los Angeles Review of Books: It’s a study of a baby and of babies, of culture and of vulnerability. Most of all, it’s a study of everything one has missed perceiving previous to the arrival of a child. Galchen’s book is an “extended essay vérité,” […]
...moreOrdinary Days of Grandeur
Don’t miss the weekly staff picks over at the Paris Review. Lorin Stein recommends Brenda Shaughnessy’s soulful and stripped down So Much Synth, Jeffery Gleaves praises “mother writer” Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors, and Caitlin Youngquist writes of Bernadette Mayer’s Works and Days, “Hardly any of Mayer’s days are spectacular, but her eye is so keenly […]
...moreWriting Motherhood
…motherhood is an undiscovered country in the literary sense, one we must venture into lest our experience goes unrecorded, or recorded only by men. At the New York Times, Sarah Ruhl reviews Rivka Galchen’s new collection of essays, Little Labors, and imagines a rich and intimate solidarity, even friendship, between herself and Galchen as mothers. She […]
...moreWomen Writers, Whatever That Means
I had considered envying men before—I pretend to envy things like their higher incidence of ungrounded confidence and monomania, but I don’t really envy those things, and I’m not sure I even believe in them… In an excerpt published in the New Yorker from her forthcoming book, Rivka Galchen writes about her first experience of real […]
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