One of the ways in which mothering has been directly, specifically useful for my writing is that I got to do a lot of reading aloud. I practiced first as a kid, on my younger sister. Later it was something that I loved about having children of my own.

So I’m honored that David Naimon asked me to talk about Le Guin, writing, and motherhood for this great podcast series, and I’m also really, really pleased that he asked me to read bits of my own and Ursula’s work. I enjoyed doing “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter,” including the great passages by Virginia Woolf about the writer “fishing the mind’s lake.” [56:30] And I loved talking [1:12:30] about the part of “The Shobies’ Story” that is about family, and getting lost, and how telling stories can help lost people find the way.

Listen here: https://tinhouse.com/podcast/crafting-with-ursula-julie-phillips-on-the-writing-mother/

Then listen to all the other episodes. Each one is a gem.

Author photo by Chris van Houts

“There’s a saying that there are only two stories: a person goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. I knew my story: I was the stranger who came to town. But when my children came, I was no longer a stranger, or even at the center of my own story. In this way motherhood, which gave me myself, seemed paradoxically to take away my understanding of myself. I’d become something unknown to me.”

Leeuwarden City of Literature kindly invited me to write a short essay for their project Uitgesteld geluk (‘Happiness Delayed’). My contribution, on self and motherhood, will be read aloud by Marjolein Ley in Noardburgum, Friesland, on Thursday, Aug 11, in a beautiful Dutch version by Elske Schotanus. Afterward it will be published on their website in EN/NL/FR. Thank you to patient and sharp-eyed editor Tryntsje van der Steege, and to Elske for her translations into Dutch and Frisian.

Details here: https://www.leeuwardencityofliterature.nl/en/uitgesteld-geluk/julie-phillips/

I finally got to see the amazing Alice Neel show, in San Francisco, with my mother, Kit Phillips, who should have been in the picture with me but was taking it instead.

I have two in-person readings coming up. On Tuesday, May 31, at 6pm I’ll be at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle. On Wednesday, June 1, at 7pm I’ll be at Powell’s Cedar Hills in Portland. I hope to see you there! 

I’m working on a reading in Amsterdam in the first week of July. I’ll keep you posted.

As soon as The Baby on the Fire Escape comes out, I plan to start working on the biography of Ursula K. Le Guin. After talking to several wonderful editors I recently found homes for that book at Doubleday (US) and Virago (UK). I’m excited to be working with Thomas Gebremedhin and Rose Tomaszewska respectively. Virago made this great cover mockup for me to dream about while I’m writing.

Here’s the official news from The Bookseller (UK): https://www.thebookseller.com/rights/virago-snaps-up-first-and-only-authorised-biography-of-ursula-le-guin

And from the (Portland) Oregonian: https://www.oregonlive.com/books/2022/03/ursula-k-le-guins-biography-gets-a-publisher-and-a-release-date.html

Though I’m a notorious deadline blower I did promise to deliver a manuscript in 2025 for publication in 2026. Fingers crossed.

An insightful, provocative, and witty exploration of the relationship between motherhood and art—for anyone who is a mother, wants to be, or has ever had one.

In my second book, The Baby on the Fire Escape, I explore the problems of creativity and motherhood, asking the questions, “What does a great artist who is also a mother look like? What does it mean to write, not in ‘a room of one’s own,’ but in a shared, domestic space?”

My original plan was to research biographical essays about some women I was interested in: Neel, Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Audre Lorde, Angela Carter, and others. They had motherhood in common, so I drafted a proposal saying I was going to explore the unmapped spaces in creative women’s lives. I assumed I would map as I went along.

Then I went out into those uncharted lands and got lost. I knew how to make a story about a creative life, but not a maternal one. Mothers’ experience started seeming not only unmapped but unthinkable.

The women I wrote about dealt with mothering in very different ways. Susan Sontag became a mother at nineteen, Angela Carter at forty-three. Alice Walker had one child, Diane di Prima five. They worked in the attic, in the car, in the bedroom, on the bed, at a desk with a baby carrier beside them. They loved mothering, struggled with it, redefined it to fit their lives. What they had in common was their fierce desire to find the time and self they needed to do their work.

I finally concluded that creative motherhood is about keeping the baby on the fire escape: it’s about maintaining a constantly renegotiated, provisional, day-to-day work-life balance. It’s about boundaries, and not giving too much of yourself away. And ultimately it’s a hero’s journey, in the fairy-tale sense: a tale of becoming, an adventure in the woods, the ones you have to go into when you lose yourself, whether as a mother or an artist, the place where the chronic, day-to-day time of care work becomes the narrative time of choice and change.

The Baby on the Fire Escape will be published by W.W. Norton, April 26, 2022 (US) and June or July (UK). The beautiful cover design is by Sarahmay Wilkinson, and the painting is Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia), 1967, by Alice Neel.