Creating Literary Community for Writers Raising Children

On November 12, at the Pen Parentis Literary Salon in Lower Manhattan, I hear author Jimin Han say something I’ve never heard a writer admit before.

“I didn’t really commit to being a writer until I had children,” Han says to a room of 20 or so writers, all of whom are parents. There is a pause as she lets that comment sink in. “Because then, my children made my world pretty small, and they would ask me if I wrote anything that day.” Around the room, there are noises of both affection and surprise. One woman to my right exclaims, “I should get my kids to do that!”

Han continues: “There were a lot of people I knew who would say things to their children like, ‘Be yourself,’ and ‘Find your creativity,’ and all this stuff, and I felt like… if I wasn’t doing that for myself, I couldn’t tell them to do the same thing.”

The statement feels nothing short of revolutionary. Most people in attendance have only ever been told that having children will get in the way of their writing careers. To hear that becoming a parent can actually inspire a writer is exactly why they come to Pen Parentis, a non-profit literary organization for parents who write.

Pen Parentis is the brainchild of Milda De Voe, a Columbia MFA graduate and mother of two who writes under the name M. M. De Voe. A prolific author, De Voe has won or been nominated for upwards of 24 literary awards, including short stories, flash fiction, grants for her novel-in-progress, and an international horror competition.

De Voe and her husband had just moved to downtown Manhattan, one block away from the Twin Towers, five months before 9/11. In the years after the attacks, the once-thriving arts community in the neighborhood was trying to get back on its feet. De Voe attended a grant-writing seminar as a favor to a neighbor. There, she saw the need for more literature grants in the area.

“I called up my friend Arlaina (Tibensky), a Columbia classmate, and I brainstormed with her,” she says. “Both of us at the time had just had children… I had just had my second, and she had just had her first. We were really struggling to try to figure out how to keep going. Because at every turn, people would tell us, ‘Well, you’re a mom, you shouldn’t be writing,’ or ‘Are you writing a mommy blog?’”

Although parenting blogs were rising in prominence at the time, De Voe resented the idea that she should be confined to only writing about parenting. “It was really hard to find anybody who would say, ‘Of course you can write a novel,’ she says. “So we thought we would have a reading series in which we only featured writers who had kids, just to see how they do it. What are they doing to keep themselves going? How are they finding time to write?”

The first season of the series attracted such prominent writers as Jennifer Cody Epstein, Darin Strauss, and Arthur Phillips. After a year, in 2010, De Voe incorporated into a 501(c)3 nonprofit and rebranded as Pen Parentis. Emblazoned on the organization’s website in large block letters is their mission: “Pen Parentis provides critical resources to working writers to help them stay on creative track after starting a family.”

De Voe admits that the stigma against working parents is not an easy one to shake. “The way you hear it is in the people who don’t have kids and when you say, ‘We run this thing for parents,’ they say, ‘I’m too dedicated to my career; I could never have kids,’” she says. “And that, to me, as a parent, makes me feel like someone who’s not as dedicated to my career because I decided to have kids, which is wrong… In graduate school especially, if you’re in an MFA program, and you’re a woman, this is the conversation that people don’t talk about. A lot of your professors will not talk about it. It’s just not a discussion, the fact that it’s doable.”

But De Voe’s insistence that it is doable has led to Pen Parentis’ steady growth over the last decade. The free Facebook community, Pen Parentis Behind Closed Doors, currently has over 600 members. It’s open to any writer with children. “We do not discriminate based on genre or anything else,” De Voe says. “We don’t even mind if your child is grown and flown, because then you can support other people.”

The monthly salons, also free and open to anyone (parent or not), see a regular community of writers coming back each week. In 2010, as part of the salons, De Voe inaugurated an annual $1,000 fellowship to honor one writer who completes a new project while their child is ten years old and under. It comes with mentorship and publication in Dreamers Creative Writing magazine.

There’s also something called the cycle of support, which is comprised of membership to the organization. De Voe calls it the “PBS method” of support: “If you can afford to give us money, we could really use the money,” she says, laughing. Title membership, depending on the level, comes with raffle ticket entries, writing conferences, discounts on workshops and classes, and waived fees to NYC writing spaces.

The newest features of Pen Parentis are the weekly accountability meetups in Manhattan and Brooklyn. De Voe hopes to spread these to all five boroughs soon, and eventually go national. At these weekly gatherings, writers share goals with each other and check in on each other’s progress. “There is both an external accountability to complete your goals, but also an understanding and a forgiveness when you don’t,” De Voe, who hosts the Manhattan meetup, says.

All of this serves as a grassroots community of like-minded people encouraging one another through difficult times in both their lives and careers. “People say, ‘My life changed when I found out you existed,’” says De Voe. “Not ‘When I joined you, became a member…’ no, ‘When I found out somebody cared,’ that is what changes people. When they realize that it’s not everybody that thinks you need to give up your idea of having a family to have a career.”

And you don’t. During a recent trip to the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, De Voe noticed that of the last nine winners of the Nobel Prize in literature, eight of them are parents. “Our message is that having kids doesn’t affect your talent, it only affects your resources,” she says. “And it strongly affects your resources. So during the course of your child’s life, you’re going to have less time, less money, and less energy, in various combinations of those three.”

But as De Voe points out, if you lost these resources for other reasons, like if a parent got sick or you decided to adopt a pet, society judges you differently. “Nobody is going to fault you for that,” she says. “But somehow, people do get faulted for having children. I don’t know why that is, but we’re trying to fight that.”

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You can find out more about Pen Parentis and get involved through their website, penparentis.org.