Master Class: Write Like a Mother: Finding Your Voice After Becoming a Parent with Ruth Franklin
Master Class: Write Like a Mother: Finding Your Voice After Becoming a Parent with Ruth Franklin
1 Session: Saturday, July 25
1:00-3:00pm ET
Ruth Franklin
Ruth Franklin has been juggling parenthood and writing for more than twenty years. Her criticism and essays appear regularly in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere, and her books include Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award) and The Many Lives of Anne Frank.
Are you a mother who’s struggling to get back into her groove as a writer? Has becoming a mother changed your mind about what you want to write about or what success as a writer looks like to you? Whether you have a new baby at home or you’re an empty nester (or any stage in between), this single-session workshop will help you use your experience with motherhood to increase your creativity, tapping into resources you didn’t know you had.
We’ll look at inspirational passages about parenting and creativity from mother-writers such as Shirley Jackson, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Audre Lorde, and come up with nuts-and-bolts strategies to keep your work moving forward even after you’ve been up all night with a sick child. “Being a mother is learning about strengths you didn’t know you had and dealing with fears you never knew existed.” (Shonda Rhimes)
Workshop Highlights:
Reframe your self-narrative around parenting and writing
Learn from the experience of others with similar challenges
Strategize practical tips for working under time constraints
To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form by Friday, July 17.
Ruth Franklin is a book critic and former editor at The New Republic. Her most recent book is The Many Lives of Anne Frank (Yale University Press, 2025), which Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called “an essential look at the diarist’s legacy.” Her first biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2016) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography about and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2016, a Time magazine top nonfiction book of 2016, and a “best book of 2016” by The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, and others. In The Washington Post, Elaine Showalter called it “a sympathetic and masterful biography that both uncovers Jackson’s secret and haunting life and repositions her as a major artist.”
Franklin’s work appears in many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in biography, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a Leon Levy Fellowship in biography, and the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2011), was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
