"both parenting and writing require care and creativity"
SING ME A CIRCLE author Samina Najmi on the "rich matriarchal inheritance" of watching her mother and grandmother keep diaries, and learning to write in small pockets of time
Hello there! Welcome to Be Less Careful. This is a good creatures interview, a series that explores the intersection of caregiving and creative practice. If you know (or are!) a good creature whose work we should feature, send me an email—you can just reply to this newsletter.
three quick things before we dive in!
I had so much fun chatting with Jennifer Reid, MD and Mara Gordon, MD about writing, medicine, and trying new things in midlife. I have not gotten it together to share the recording yet, but lucky for us, Jennifer did; if you caught us live, thank you! and if you missed it, you can watch here:
And if you happen to be in the south Jersey/Philadelphia area, I’ll be at the launch party for Jennifer’s new book Guilt Free: Reclaiming Your Life from Unreasonable Expectations next Tuesday, January 23rd at Inkwood in Haddonfield, and I’d love to see you there!
write with me this February
On Saturday, February 28th from 1-4pm eastern on zoom, I’ll be teaching a workshop, Finding the Plot in Memoir, through Rutgers-Camden’s Writers House.
help me plan the next subscriber workshop
So far we’ve talked about creative urgency in dark times and how to get out of your own way, and we had a really joyful planning party with planner extraordinaire Sarah Hart-Unger. We’ll gather on Sunday, February 8th at noon eastern/9am pacific. Help me pick what we do next!
Today’s interview is with Samina Najmi, whose new book Sing Me a Circle, traces her lineage through Pakistan, England, and California. She wrote the essays in her book across ten years while she was raising her children and working as an academic. This series has featured writers with babies and toddlers and grown up kids and everything in between, and as someone with kids in that middle stage (my 7th grader just attended his first school dance!) I always appreciate the perspective from different stages.
Below, we talk about the “lifeline” of brief moments to write and edit when her kids were very small, how caregiving has deepened her sense of time, and early memories of her mother and grandmother writing that have stayed with her all her life.
Who do you care for?
Until five years ago, it was my two children. They’re now grown, and I’m an empty-nester. So this is a retrospective, unless caring for my elderly cats counts.
What kind of creative work do you do?
I write creative nonfiction, specifically personal essays and memoir. When my children were very young, I wrote critical essays—literary criticism, to be exact—and I’d say that as far as process goes, for me there isn’t a hard line between creative and critical practices. I appreciate the confluences of the two.
What are some ways care-giving fosters creativity and vice versa?
That’s a great question. I was writing (critical essays) long before I became a mother. My children’s early years were an uncertain time in my professional life; I had my doctorate in English but didn’t have a secure teaching position. Then came my daughter and son, 21 months apart. Talk about uncertain! For all the highs, those early years of parenting unmoored me. I was never sure if I was doing the right things and feared that if I made a critical mistake, I could inadvertently do lasting damage. I also missed the quiet. Missed being able to hold a thought.
So I snatched brief moments for my writing and editing projects. They were a lifeline. Caregiving taught me to make the most of small pockets of time. This was revolutionary because I had always assumed I needed at least a four-hour block of time to get any writing or thinking done.
Conversely, I brought to my caregiving long years of observing closely and reading between the lines. Surface-level behaviors in young children can indicate deeper concerns, and my writing practice had trained me to analyze, make connections, and communicate—or at least try to.
When my children were in elementary school, I began writing creative nonfiction. And since my personal essays probe whatever’s on my mind, many of them engaged with parenting in some way. (The essays in Sing Me a Circle were written over a ten-year span while my children were growing up.) My writing still engages with motherhood on one level or another because it’s an integral aspect of my identity. You don’t stop being a parent just because the children have grown up, right? In fact, the existential reality of being a parent bridges the present, past, and future in ways I hadn’t anticipated. So caregiving has deepened my understanding of time, a central preoccupation of my essays.
I’ll add that both the writing life and the parenting life demand focus, discipline, and consistency. They also demand vigilance, a self-critical eye that keeps one open to learning from one’s mistakes and revising course. In other words, both parenting and writing require care and creativity. In that sense, the line between caregiving and creativity feels porous to me.
more good creatures, on time and creative work
Who provided a model for you in terms of combining caregiving and creativity?
My foremothers, of course. I grew up seeing my mother write her “diary”—that is, personal essays—every day. She said it was her way of “sorting out” her life. (She’d use those English words in the middle of Urdu.) It was only a few minutes a day, but my siblings and I knew not to disturb her while she was writing. I realize now how unusual that was, especially in the Pakistan of the seventies and eighties. But you know, her mother (my grandmother) also wrote. She didn’t have young children anymore, but she was writing her memoir for the last twenty years of her life and offered to read from it if we would listen. I wish I had recognized at the time what a rich matriarchal inheritance that was, but they were unsung writers. Even so, those early images of women in my family writing, whatever else they had to do, have stayed with me. And memory shapes our expectations of ourselves. I think of Alice Walker’s 1974 essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” which revisits the daily creative practices of her maternal ancestors and recasts them as art that went acknowledged.
Is there something specific you do to jumpstart creativity?
For me, the single most important jumpstart is setting my alarm for the wee hours of the morning. 4-6 am seems to be my magic moment for focused thinking and writing. If I manage to be present for it consistently, a draft of an essay is likely to take shape in a week or so. Of course, there’s no telling how long I will tinker with it.
Truth is I’ve always been an early riser. Even as a school girl in Pakistan, preparing for city-wide Board Exams, I preferred to get up early to study rather than stay up late. Years later with motherhood, this became a vital practice: waking up before the rest of my family in order to claim some thinking and writing time for myself. Now much of the day is presumably mine, but those jumpstart hours for creativity remain the same.
What advice would you give someone who has a creative practice and is embarking on becoming a caregiver?
Things will change, but trust that caregiving needn’t be the end of your creative practice. You will gain other material for your craft, learn other approaches to your art. Above all, believe that you can create in 15-20 minute bursts. Creative nonfiction writer Maxine Hong Kingston has said—and she wasn’t speaking in the context of caregiving—that that’s now her process. After twenty minutes of writing, she stops and takes a walk. She comes back to the page recharged and ready for the next twenty-minute burst of creativity. I’d love that for all of us.
Samina Najmi teaches multiethnic US literature at California State University, Fresno. Her memoir-in-essays, Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time, won the Aurora Polaris Award in Creative Nonfiction and was published by Trio House Press in Oct, 2025. It has received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and is featured among Poets & Writers’ five nonfiction debuts of the year. It is also included in the Best of 2025 roundups by Debutiful and the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). Samina’s essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have won other honors. Daughter of multiple migrations, Samina grew up in Pakistan and England, and has lived in Fresno since 2006. Here she has watched with wonder her children, her students, and her citrus grow.
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Thank you for sharing this! The observation about learning to work in "small pockets of time" rather than waiting for those mythical four-hour blocks feels like such an essential insight, not just for parents but for anyone navigating creative work alongside life's demands.
What strikes me most is the point about the porousness between caregiving and creativity. Both require that particular kind of attentiveness: the ability to notice what's beneath the surface, to hold multiple timelines simultaneously, to revise and learn from missteps. I hadn't thought before about how the analytical skills of close reading might translate to reading a child's behavior, but it makes perfect sense. Both are acts of interpretation that require patience and humility. Lovely insights!
This was really fun!