One of the signature pieces of mine at 826LA is to integrate mindfulness into our pedagogy, because the world has been traumatized over the last five years, particularly. You don’t have to look far to see what we’ve been through as a country, with COVID-19, with the racial reckoning, a failed coup, and everything else. People are traumatized.
It’s good for me, in my own brain and life, to talk about these issues. It brings up a sort of mindfulness for me in terms of my own emotional storm. It’s good that it feels like a broader issue around the way that the world cares for mothers, and around depression, and not just about me, because mom rage doesn’t feel like such a constant anymore in my life.
The origins come from the life I was living and writing about while I attended Louisiana State University for Creative Writing. I wrote a story about a man wandering around Baton Rouge, where the novel is set. My professor, James Wilcox, liked the story and suggested I continue it. I went to law school instead.
Making a living as a writer is not easy, but it’s possible. Workshop can be challenging. To learn about writing, you have to open yourself up to so much vulnerability. Not only with what you’re writing, but simply being a writer at your desk who wants to have people take your things seriously. The thing I don’t want anyone to feel, after interacting with me, is discouraged.
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