Replay: Rebecca Makkai shares Five Things She's Learned about Writing While Parenting
Check out the first five minutes of her recent class.
“When people ask how I balance parenting with a writing career, two answers come to mind. The first (especially if it’s asked by a condescending stranger) is “What a weird question — would you ask a man how he juggles being both a banker and a father??” and the second (especially if it’s asked by a fellow writer, one whose eyes are full of despair) is… well, it’s a two-hour long answer.”
– Rebecca Makkai, Five Things I’ve Learned about Writing While Parenting
Last week, celebrated writer and teacher Rebecca Makkai joined Five Things I've Learned to share all she’s learned about how to navigate the joys and demands that come with creating art while at the same time keeping the people you love both safe and happy.
In Five Things I’ve Learned about Writing While Parenting, Rebecca offers an honest, compassionate look at what it really means to pursue creative work while caring for the people you love. Drawing from her own life as an award-winning novelist, teacher, and mother of two teenagers, she breaks down the emotional, practical, and ethical challenges of sustaining an artistic practice amid the noise, chaos, and constant demands of family life.
Her class explores everything from carving out time to write during nap schedules and school pick-ups, to quieting parental guilt, to navigating the complicated question of whether—and how—to write about your children.
Rebecca’s insights are grounded in the understanding that every parent-artist’s circumstances are different, and her goal is not to prescribe productivity but to offer tools that genuinely help. By the end, participants come away with renewed permission to protect their art, practical approaches to balancing responsibilities, and a deeper sense that they do not have to choose between their writing and their children. Rebecca shows, with warmth and lived experience, that it is possible to show up for both.
About Rebecca: Rebecca is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels I Have Some Questions for You, The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, and the story collection Music for Wartime.
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Great Believers received an American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors, and was named one of the 100 Best Books of the Twenty-First Century by The New York Times.
A Guggenheim fellow, Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Bennington College and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago
Thanks for being part of Five Things I’ve Learned on Substack.
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