I’ve been trying to find an in on writing about motherhood in non-canned/non-conventional way that doesn’t just sound like the millions of other stories, fiction and non-fiction, that are already out there. I’m particularly interested in the intersection of motherhood, queerness, desire and loneliness. The failure of commonly held wisdoms and guidance surrounding the pregnant body and the post-partum body. I’ve done a lot of research this last year for my fiction project about the placenta. I’ve been struck by how it remains so mysterious in both science and culture. In terms of AI, I’ve been thinking about where motherhood and AI can overlap. I mean, AI certainly can’t breasteed your baby but what does that frontier look like? Can AI help us move beyond the heternormative reign of What to Expect? What’s the dark side here? I found myself asking ChatGPT a lot of questions in my son’s first year that I could have asked Google but maybe I was looking for some sort of connection while in the lonely throws of sleeplessness and second guessing myself. I’ve recently really enjoyed the hybridity and perspective of Shelia Heti’s Motherhood and Louisa’s Hall’s Reproduction. Both works are somehow very intimate/ and also quite clinical/removed from the subject matter– a hard balance to stike when writing about motherhood.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.