Real Life Archives – Christina Baker Kline

April 6, 2011 By bakerkline

Rejuvenate Your Writing Life!

A Restorative Mini-Retreat for Writing Mamas

With authors Christina Baker Kline and Deborah Siegel of SheWrites.com

Saturday, May 21, 9:30am – 3:30 pm at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, 53 Prospect Park West (near the 2/3, F, Q, B)

What do you need to turn your writing dream into a reality?

You spend your days taking care of other people’s needs. This May, give yourself a Mother’s Day gift of time and space for contemplation and creativity. Think of it as a spa treatment for your mind.

Maybe you’ve kept a private journal and dream of starting a blog. Maybe you have an idea for a memoir. Or maybe you just want to start writing and don’t yet know the form. Chances are, if you’re a mother and trying to write, your greatest obstacle is time. Whether you’re at the idea stage or further along, we’ll help you get to the next level not only in your writing, but in your writing life.

Christina and Deborah are two professional writing mamas who believe that writing is vital—even when it has to happen in the crevices of our lives. In this beautiful setting we’ll combine strategies for how to fit writing into your everyday life with concrete exercises and feedback designed to get your creative juices flowing. We’ll provide a stimulating and pampering combination of workshops, group conversations with other writer-mothers, one-on-one consultations, inspiring writing prompts, and Q&As. You’ll leave at the end of the day with fresh ideas and insights, pages of new writing, concrete goals for your writing and your life – and a sense of community, something no writing mama should be without.

This day-long gift-to-self includes a delicious lunch, healthy snacks, caffeine (and caffeine-free) drinks … and of course – chocolate! Cost: $175 ($195 after May 1). Space is limited. Register early to save a spot!

Register NOW

Deborah Siegel, PhD (left) is an expert on gender, politics, and the unfinished business of feminism across generations. She is the author of Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, co-editor of the literary anthologyOnly Child, founder of the group blog Girl w/Pen, co-founder of the webjournal The Scholar & Feminist Online, and Founding Partner of SheWrites.com. Her writings on women, feminism, contemporary families, sex, and popular culture have appeared in venues including The Washington Post, The Guardian, Slate’s The Big Money, The Huffington Post, The American Prospect, More, Ms., Psychology Today, and The Mothers Movement Online.

Deborah received her doctorate in English and American Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has been a Visiting Scholar at both Barnard College and the University of Michigan. She is currently a Fellow at the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership and a member of the Women’s Media Center Progressive Women’s Voice project and serves on the Board of the Council on Contemporary Families.

A mother to boy-girl twins, Deborah recently launched a new “social” writing project through which she’ll be building community and debate around the gendering of childhood as she works on her own writing on these themes. Follow her thoughts, currently housed at The Pink and Blue Diaries and Twitter, and check out her regular column at She Writes, in which she also tackles issues of work/life, motherhood, and the writing life.

And you know me – Christina. My bio is on this site! If you have questions, email me at bakerkline@aol.com.

March 10, 2011 By bakerkline

Can Writing about Grief Make You Happy?

It might sound crazy, but for Allison Gilbert, writing about mourning has been an uplifting experience:

Several weeks ago my new book, Parentless Parents, was published. This is the third book I’ve written that deals with mourning and loss. And while you might assume I’d be the last person you’d want to meet at a cocktail party, I’ve been told otherwise. I smile; I laugh. You might even call me bubbly.

Each book I’ve written is the result of successfully pushing through an unwanted and unanticipated experience – and using that experience for something more powerful than anger and self-pity. Writing about death and grief has been healing for me.

I wrote my first book, Covering Catastrophe, after nearly dying on 9/11. I was a producer at WNBC-TV in New York at the time, and when the second tower collapsed I thought I was going to be buried alive. The dust cloud knocked me off my feet, and emergency crews dragged me off the street so I wouldn’t be crushed by falling debris. I was taken by ambulance to the emergency room at Bellevue Hospital. Doctors cut off my clothes to examine my skin, and shoved tubes down my throat so I could breathe.

Physically, I was fine. Emotionally, though, I was in trouble. I had panic attacks for days, and many journalists I’d later speak with were also having traumatic flashbacks. Because of what we experienced, three other radio and television journalists and I decided to write a book documenting what it was like to be a broadcaster that day, both personally and professionally. Creating this book was cathartic for all of us, and what happened after publication was even better. Covering Catastrophe was turned into a documentary by the U.S. State Department, has been recognized by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, and every penny earned has been donated to 9/11 charities. Giving back is the best emotional Band-Aid I know.

Three days after September 11, my father died of cancer. I was 31 years old. Almost immediately (and because my mother had died several years earlier) I felt compelled to write about my parents’ deaths. Always Too Soon was hard to write because for the five years it took to complete, my parents’ deaths were always with me. I had to deal with how much I missed them with every period and comma I typed. What kept me going was the anticipation of helping others cope with the same pain. My muse was an imaginary group of readers who needed comfort and validation.

And readers responded. Men and women emailed me wanting to talk about being an adult orphan. Many of these emails specifically addressed the challenges of being a parent without parents. To manage the influx of emails, I began sorting them by state and city, and then, when I had two or three from any one area, I started playing matchmaker. It was in putting these strangers together that Parentless Parents, the organization, was formed. It was also how I knew that Parentless Parents, the book, needed to be written.

In Parentless Parents, I write not only about how the loss of my parents affects me, but also the myriad ways their absence affects my children, who don’t have my mother and father as grandparents. Since the book came out, it’s been warmly embraced. Parentless Parents support groups are taking shape all over the country. The Parentless Parents Group Page on Facebook continues to grow. And then there are the new emails I’ve been receiving from readers, like this one from a mother of two young children:

“You tapped right into my life, my heart and my soul. It is comforting to know that at least one other person in the world has gone through similar tragedies and has some understanding of what I deal with on a daily basis.”

In truth, I’m happy in the face of what I write because I have an outlet for all my feelings. Conducting interviews, leading focus groups, creating the Parentless Parents Survey, the first of its kind, and writing – all of it has brought me incredible peace. My upbeat attitude has been shaped by creating a new and different conversation about loss, and the symbiotic relationship I have with my readers. Ultimately, the most important lesson I’ve learned from writing is that I’m not alone.

Allison Gilbert, author of Parentless Parents, founded a nationwide network of parents who have experienced the loss of their own mothers and fathers. To find a Parentless Parents chapter near you, go to www.parentlessparents.com. You can also join Parentless Parents on Facebook by clicking here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=77976059211&ref=ts. Watch her book trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0vYt8L7qNg. Allison is also the author of Always Too Soon and Covering Catastrophe.

September 27, 2010 By bakerkline

Beast of Burden

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted much lately. Keeping a blog is like having a pet — it requires constant maintenance. And when I wasn’t deep into writing my novel, I derived a lot of pleasure from it (and still do, in sporadic bursts). But working on a novel is like having a newborn baby. It keeps you up at night, it needs constant feeding, it’s unpredictable and exhausting. And like new parents who find that the frisky puppy that brought them so much pleasure before the baby came along has begun to feel like a burden, with its manic energy and constant need for attention, I find myself wishing that someone else would feed and walk this bloggy beast for me.

So I’ve decided — as I work toward my early 2011 novel deadline — to give myself a break. I’ll still post when I’m inspired, most likely once or twice a week, and when other writers send me fabulous pieces. (I have a few in the hopper now.) If you subscribe by email — see the button at right — you’ll be alerted when there’s a new post. And I’ll point my readers toward other blogs by writers that I love. Alice Elliott Dark, wise woman/fiction guru, has only posted twice so far, but her new blog, Walks with Dogs (appropriately enough), is already on my list of favorites. Louise DeSalvo, memoirist and mentor, provides thoughtful meditations on writing at WritingaLife. And I stumbled on novelist Janet Fitch’s wonderful blog when someone sent me her “Ten Writing Tips that Can Help Almost Anyone” (yes, it’s true, they can).

Meanwhile I’ll continue to feed and walk my own blog-dog, just not so often or with such guilt when I don’t. And in the spring, when the baby is sleeping through the night, I’ll have more energy for the beast. For now, he can sleep at my feet while I’m writing, dreaming bloggy dreams.

July 14, 2010 By bakerkline

How Do You Become Someone Else?

The writer Elizabeth Strout, explaining what it’s like to write from the point of view of an irascible retired schoolteacher in her 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Olive Kitteridge:

“I actually see myself in all my characters. In order to imagine what it feels like to be another person I have to use my own experiences and responses to the world. I have to play attention to what I have felt and observed, then push those responses to an extreme while keeping the story within the realm of being psychologically and emotionally true. Many times after writing a story or a novel, I will suddenly think, oh, I’m feeling what (for example), Olive would feel. But in fact the process has worked the other way.”

March 18, 2010 By bakerkline

Writer, Interrupted

Jill Smolowe hasn’t been writing much lately. She has a pretty good excuse:

Lately I’ve been thinking about writing.

And therein lies the problem. Thinking about writing is one thing; writing is another matter entirely.

Though my professional writing life continues to produce a steady stream of words (and a steady paycheck), my personal writing life—the one that produces memoirs, essays and novels without guarantee of income or publication—has been largely in hibernation for three years now. I know that weekly magazine output would, for many, add up to a writing career. Certainly, it did for me for many years. But at some point in my 30-plus-year journalism career, my writing appetite no longer felt sated by short pieces about other people’s lives. It came to require the finding of personal expression through longer-form memoir and fiction. That’s the work that leaves me alternately frustrated and satisfied; that’s the work that has been slumbering the better part of these last few years.

Granted, some of my excuses for avoiding work are probably better than yours. On January 1, 2007 my husband was diagnosed with leukemia. That day, without reservation, I set aside the novel I was working on, a manuscript that after two years and 200 pages was finally beginning to take shape. Nine months later when Joe returned to his desk, I returned to mine. In fits and starts that mirrored his medical fortunes, I eventually finished a first draft of the novel.

Then, in June 2009, my husband died.

I know. I feel your sympathy. Thank you.

But this isn’t about my pain. This is about my writing—which is what I haven’t been doing since that startling moment when my husband of 24 years fried some eggs, chatted with me about another person’s colon cancer, then abruptly checked out of my life forever.

That someone else with the advanced-stage colon cancer? My sister.

Like I said, some of my excuses for avoiding work are probably better than yours. After Joe died, countless people told me, “Don’t make any major decisions for a year.” By that they meant don’t make any life-altering decisions that I might later regret. (Don’t relocate. Don’t sell my house. Don’t quit my job. Don’t remarry). When I would say that I’m not writing, I would receive nods of approval. “Of course you’re not. You need to give yourself a break.”

What they didn’t realize—what I didn’t realize—is that I’d already made a big decision: after 12 years of honoring a pre-dawn, five-day-a-week appointment in front of my computer screen, I’d bailed on my writing life. By so-doing I’d stripped away a key part of my identity: writer.

Granted, during these last nine months I’ve journaled, at first dutifully and without heart, lately with increasing attention to detail. All the while I’ve been telling myself, There’s material here for future writing projects. (Duh.) But recapping events, recording snippets of conversation, providing memory jogs for future narratives, does that count? Christina rendered a verdict in an earlier entry on this blog: “All of it is part of creating a novel. But it’s not writing.”

I couldn’t agree more. For decades I referred to myself as a “magazine writer” or a “journalist,” unable to lay claim to the title of “writer” because that seemed too exalted, a goal to which I could only aspire. Then one day after years of slaving away daily at novels (none of which have found their way into print), it suddenly came to me: I’m a writer. With that acknowledgment, the word lost its loftiness and assumed the contours of a fitting self-description. By then, by dint of persistent, hard work, I’d found my way to a very simple (some might say unsparing) definition of writer: a writer is someone who writes. Period.

The corollary to that, of course, is also simple (and equally unsparing): if you’re not writing, you’re not a writer. Period.

That would be me these last nine months: not a writer. Yeah, I’ve got some compelling excuses. But that’s all they are. Excuses. And more and more, of late, they sit less and less comfortably.

Outside, I hear the rumble of garbage trucks. Dawn is breaking. Today, I know, is going to be a better day. Why? Because today I’ve pushed myself beyond thinking about writing and done some work. Granted a piece like this is a sprint, not the more demanding and disciplined marathon of a novel or a memoir. But wrestling these ideas into coherent shape is an important first step. Fate, which has already stripped away one identity (wife) and imposed another (widow), may not yet be done with me, but only I can lay claim to that identity (writer) I continue to regard as so precious. With this piece, I am serving myself notice: time to stop with the excuses and restake my claim.

Jill Smolowe is author of the memoir An Empty Lap: One Couple’s Journey to Parenthood and co-editor of the anthology A Love Like No Other: Stories from Adoptive Parents. An award-winning journalist, she was a foreign affairs writer for Newsweek and Time, and is currently a Senior Writer at People. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, among them The Washington Post Magazine, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and the Reader’s Digest “Today’s Best NonFiction” series.