mind the gap

share with me how you're writing around the edges

Hi friends,
For those of you new here – you’re so welcome – I’m an Irish writer and tender to many things living at the foothills of the Wicklow mountains in south eastern Ireland. I’m interested in exploring how it feels to write, hold and (m)other on this beautiful, tattered planet right now. Curious? Head to my Welcome Page. To stay up to date with upcoming events, head to my Members Hub.

Ok, let’s begin with this week’s post.xx


Image by Hannah Spencer

This week I made the final edits to a journal submission while also conversing with my 7 year old son about how much he loved his new bubble maker, the bubbles of which he had named ‘Jefford’.

Driving to school pick up I listened to a recording I’d made on my phone of the opening pages of my memoir, I made notes on my phone while walking to the school gates of the changes I needed to make and then I made these changes later in the evening while the children watched tv.

Digging a compacted area of grass in the garden, I figured out how to fix a niggle in my memoir’s time line, I held the thought as I hung the bed sheets on the washing line.

Night after night I read over sections of my book on my laptop whilst rubbing my son’s back in bed as he falls asleep; I’ve gotten good at rubbing, singing and reading all at once.

I’m writing this post to you today in between acupuncture clients, I’ll be editing it in bed as my son falls asleep, and then again tomorrow in the car in the hour between dropping my children off to a theatre show and going to watch the performance myself.

Image by Karolina Cwik

I find I am drawn to writers who show us behind the scenes glimpses into how their books were written. In her wonderful memoir A Ghost in the Throat, for example, Irish writer Doireann Ní Griofa writes :

THIS IS A FEMALE TEXT. This is a female text, composed while folding someone else’s clothes {…} This is a female text borne of guilt and desire, stitched to a soundtrack of cartoon nursery rhymes. p. 3

It feels so important that these words come at the start of Ní Griofa’s memoir. I love that she is showing us the labour involved, it means that how this book was written matters.

Similarly, in her collection of essays Constellations

Sinéad Gleeson

writes about the interrupted space she wrote her book from - she did not, she makes clear, have a room of her own. And in an interview for the Irish literary journal Tolka Gleeson speaks about how the idea for the female group The Inions in her debut novel Hagstone came to her as she was hanging out the washing.

In Making Babies Anne Enright writes of bouncing her baby on one knee whilst typing with the other hand.

Image by Moon and Cheeze

I don’t think this way of making and creating is exclusive to mothers and caregivers, but it is certainly one that many of us bringing up children experience.

The fracturing of consciousness.

The interruption of thought.

The absence of long stretches of time.

The division of self.

Making and thinking in the gaps.

Writing around the edges.

What is this connection between the domestic and the sublime?

In her group biography of women artists The Baby in the Fire Escape Julie Phillips explores how various mother-artists have tackled these challenges around creativity, motherhood and what she terms the ‘mind-baby problem’. The whole book is an inspirational, galvanising testament to how women make art. Phillips quotes artist Sarah Ruhl:

There was a time, when I first found out I was pregnant with twins, that I saw only a state of conflict. When I looked at theater and parenthood, I saw only war, competing loyalties, and I thought my writing life was over. There were times when it felt as through my children were annihilating me …, and finally I came to the thought, All right then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow. And then I could breathe. I could investigate the pauses. p. 9

Investigate the pauses. Yes, this is what I feel like I am doing. Finding the shards of light on the floorboards and stepping into them whenever they appear.

At the same time I deeply resonated with Maggie Nelson in her memoir The Argonauts when she writes of the challenges as a writer of feeling so inextricably linked to our children. I remember reading the paragraph below in the months after my third child was born and gasping with relief that someone else had put on paper how I was feeling. The utter relief at feeling seen.

In his epic treatise Bubbles, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk puts forth something he calls the “rule of negative gynecology”. To truly understand the fetal and perinatal world, Sloterdijk writes, “one must reject the temptation to extricate oneself from the affair with outside views of the mother-child relationship; where the concern is insight into intimate connections, outside observation is already the fundamental mistake.” I applaud this involution, this “cave research,” this turn away from mastery and toward the immersive bubble of “blood, amniotic fluid, sonic bubble and breath.” I feel no urge to extricate myself from this bubble. But here’s the catch: I cannot hold my baby at the same time as I write. P. 45

Here’s the catch. It’s the catch that fascinates me. The ambivalence I feel. The competing devotions I am constantly torn between.

I’m interested in asking how do these experiences of simultaneity and contradiction inform the work we make?

How do they inform the structure of our texts, the brush strokes we make, the thoughts we have, the connections we make?

What is lost? What is gained?

What do these very real realities do to our creative process? What does interruption do to our art?

Here’s where you come in:

In the shower yesterday morning, I had the idea that it would be really interesting to ask all of you to share, as a sort of visual experiment, where and how you’ve written this week.

Did you have uninterrupted time alone?

Or did you scribble at the school gates, whilst waiting for a football match to finish, while your baby napped on your chest?

Where did you find gaps?

I’d love for you to take a photo and share it in the comments, or tag me in a note. You can share a few words of what gaps you’ve found. You can also share if no gaps were to be found! If enough of you share, I’ll make a post collage of all our writing around the edges, which could be really interesting to see!

I’m also interested to hear what you think is lost and also what is being gained by making and writing in this way … are there benefits to the fracturing, the interruption ? Jump into the comments and let me know what you think …

Layla x

Image by White Salt Photography