"Taking care of my child has unequivocally made me a better, more deeply feeling and acutely perceiving person."
"Taking care of my child has unequivocally made me a better, more deeply feeling and acutely perceiving person."
BRUTALITIES author Margo Steines on leaving the house to switch into her creative brain and becoming more ambitious in her career since becoming a parent
Hello there! This is a good creatures interview, a series that explores the intersection of caregiving and creative practice. I’m so excited to showcase people doing lots of kinds of caregiving—people caring for kids or pets or other family members and/or caring for space through gardening or community work or activism—and lots of kinds of creative work.
If you know (or are!) a good creature whose work we should feature, send me an email—you can just reply to this newsletter.
Today’s interview is with Margo Steines, whose book Brutalities is one of the most stunning I’ve read this year. I wanted to talk to Margo for this section because even though Brutalities is about some really tough subjects—being a dominatrix in New York, leaving a violent relationship, pushing her body to the brink with running and mixed martial arts—it’s also about tenderness. I was especially to drawn to a strand in the book about how falling in love and becoming pregnant changed how she thought about caring for herself. The book is also a real master class in the craft of vulnerability in memoir—there’s so much difficult subject matter, but it’s handled with such care. If you’re writing memoir, and especially if you’re working on anything around violence, sex, or bodies, I really recommend it.
Below, we talk about the nitty gritty of balancing writing, teaching, and family time, the space Margo needs to really dive in to her next book, and why she’s become more ambitious in her writing life since becoming a parent.
Who do you care for?
I care for my 3 ½ year old child.
What kind of creative work do you do?
I’m a writer.
What’s changed in your creative life since becoming a caregiver?
I used to be able to just write, without planning, on a whim or whenever. I could take an assignment and turn it around in a day if I wanted to. Now, it’s not like that at all. I have to carefully map out my availability and bandwidth, and I have to crunch all my professional and creative work into three days a week.
What do you do to help activate the switch (if it is a switch) between creative-brain and care-giving brain? (Is it possible to switch?)
I need to physically leave the space. I have a great home office that I do my professional work out of, but I cannot work on certain creative projects there. I can writer a shorter, content-y-er piece there, but for the book I am working on, I need to exit the area. I often write in a friend’s guesthouse and will occasionally hole up in a hotel room or during travel, but I don’t even attempt in the domestic space. There’s something about it that just feels awful and wrong, and I’ve tried to isolate specifics like is it the sound of children, et cetera, and I don’t know exactly what it is, just that even when my family is not home, our home is not a space I can make that work. I was the same way with my first book, even though my kid wasn’t yet born, but I did find that I could mostly edit in the home space, because for me editing is much simpler labor, whereas creating the correct conditions for generative work requires something much more abstract and specific.
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Is there something specific you do to jumpstart creativity?
Yes, I leave my house.
What does a day in your life look like as a creative and care-giver?
My partner and I split the week: he gets three days to work, I get three days to work, and we have a family day once a week. I use that time almost exclusively for my professional work. On my kiddo days, I am caregiving all day long. I get her up, nurse her, get her dressed, and either we have a home day or I bring her to her playgarden program for the morning. If she’s there, I’m home cleaning and doing laundry. In the afternoons I give her a nap and try to steal that time for catching up on work, but in practice I often end up doing more laundry. We try to do a little fun thing each day—the library, the park, a walk, etc.—and then we have dinner and a bath and then milk and book. This is getting super granular, lol.
On my work days, I don’t do much caregiving, though I am *always* working on the laundry, even on work days, and do some straightening up every time I walk through the house. I typically work from about 8am to about 10pm. This was getting really out of hand for a while, where I was working until 1 or 2 in the morning, but I reeled it in.
None of this is directly for my creative projects. Throughout the work days I do stuff like book promo and business, website, stuff like that, and from time to time I write a short creative piece on assignment. But my real project, my second book, I don’t mess with that at all until I can properly focus, which I plan for every month but which realistically happens about every other month. I take all day Monday and Tuesday to go elsewhere—my friend’s guesthouse, hotel, double dipping with a work trip, etc—and work only on that. I have to really bunker myself in at this current project stage, with no distractions and space to think. I need to be rested and fed.
I also feel a lot more ambitious in my career since becoming a parent. . . . My time is finite, but also I want to do something that I, and someday she, I hope, will be proud of.
What has caregiving given you / taken away from you?
Taking care of my child has unequivocally made me a better, more deeply feeling and acutely perceiving person. For a nonfiction writer, this is important. I think also my ability to see myself has increased, thanks to her. This isn’t a new idea, but kids really are mirrors.
I also feel a lot more ambitious in my career since becoming a parent. I always wanted to do something big with writing but it was pretty abstract and felt like a future thing, and now I feel really motivated to grind. My time is finite, but also I want to do something that I, and someday she, I hope, will be proud of.
Margo Steines holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Arizona, where she is faculty in the Writing Program. Her work was named Notable in Best American Essays and has appeared in The Sun, The Guardian, Slate, Air Mail, Brevity, Off Assignment, The New York Times (Modern Love), the anthology Letter to a Stranger, and elsewhere. She is the author of the memoir-in-essays Brutalities: A Love Story.
Margo is a born-and-raised New Yorker, a journeyman ironworker, and serves as mom to a small person. She is also a private creative coach and writing class facilitator. You can read more about her practices at margosteines.com.
Margo just wrapped a tour for her debut book, Brutalities: A Love Story. She facilitates creative writing classes and consults 1:1 with writers as a creative coach and developmental editor. You can find information about all her offerings on her website. You can find Margo on Instagram and Twitter.
more good creatures to inspire your creative practice
poet Eugenia Leigh, on how spending time with her son enhances her creativity
novelist and Postpartum Production podcast host on building creative community
Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. Subscribe to get more encouragement, inspiration, and practical advice sent right to your inbox.
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I love the number of guests here who say parenting has made them *more* professionally ambitious, not less. It really undercuts so many cultural narratives in a wonderful way!
Leaving the house…probably something I need to adopt! Thanks for the perspective.