I’m joined by two incredibly talented and funny writers, editors, novelists, mothers (in no particular order) - Jen sookfong Lee (also a celebrated poet) and Stacey May Fowles (also an award-winning sports journalist).After their first collaboration on Whatever Gets You Through: Twelve Survivors on Life After Sexual Assault, they joined forces again in 2020 to work on another anthology. Except this time, it was on a topic that they both found very close to home- literary life and motherhood. Published this May, Good Mom on Paper is a collection of twenty essays, exploring the fraught, beautiful, and complicated relationship between creativity and motherhood. 

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Today's episode is a Mother's Day special featuring an audio montage from Dear Seekers' past conversations with five writers who mother- Victoria Chang, Claudia Dey, Harriet Alida Lye, Chidiogo Akunyili-Parr and Heidi Sopinka.

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My second conversation from The Write Way to Mother series is with Ashley Audrain, author of one of the most celebrated debuts in 2021, The Push - a novel about motherhood (in a nutshell). It raises some very dark questions like: what if we don’t form a connection with our children? What happens if our children turn out to be someone we absolutely did not anticipate? The novel has been sold in over 20 countries and was on the New York Times best selling list for WEEKs. After many lined up to bid on the screen right, U.K. producer David Heyman eventually won the bid. He is known for his work on the Harry Potter films, A Marriage Story, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and many more. 

Ashley is such a warm and welcoming person and I enjoyed our conversation very much. We talked so much about motherhood and writing: how she managed to find stolen times to write during those early motherhood days; how motherhood was the catalyst for her to step out of the shadow and became a best-selling author; and how different her writing processes are from the first novel to the second.

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