"Learn to embrace small bursts of creativity"

SAD GROWNUPS author Amy Stuber on being a debut writer at 55, learning to write for the joy of it, and breaking away from ideas of perfection in creativity and caregiving

Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. My next book, The Good Mother Myth, will be out in January 2025, and you can pre-order it now!

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.

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Today’s interview is with Amy Stuber, author of the short story collection Sad Grownups (what a title!), out October 8. The “sad grownups” of the book’s title include a middle-aged queer couple arguing over whether to have children, a college professor dying from cancer, two recent high school graduates plotting a robbery, and a sixty-year-old counselor at a boys’ summer camp. Amy’s been absolutely everywhere with her new book lately, and I especially loved her interview over at The Rumpus. If you’re a short story writer, I think you’ll really love her essay at Electric Literature, which asks “Do I have to write a novel?” and tells the story of her path to publication.

Below, we talk about how her writing life has changed as her kids have grown and why you don’t have to be published to count as a real writer.

Who do you care for?

I have two kids. My older child is 19 and will start her sophomore year of college this year, and my younger child is 16 and just started his junior year of high school. The kind of care they require has evolved dramatically over the last few years. In the early years of having children, caregiving is physically and emotionally all-consuming. In the last few years, my caregiving responsibilities have lessened and changed. In many ways, they don’t need me, which is its own weirdness! But their needing me less has introduced a more conversational and friend feeling to our interactions. Both of my kids are writers, so as they’ve gotten into the teenaged years, it’s been so fun to talk to them about their creative processes and their work. Some of our best times involve taking walks and talking about what they’re reading and writing. 

What kind of creative work do you do?

I write, mainly fiction. I’ve been writing for many years, since college in the early 90s. I have had a long path to my first book, which comes out in October (likely just a few days after this is published). I also sometimes paint (not that well, but it’s really soothing and mindless for me, with no expectations attached, so I enjoy it). I also love photography, but I’m not technically good at it. I just love recording little stills of things, particularly the intersection of people and the natural world, decaying things, oddities.

order Amy’s new book, Sad Grownups

What’s changed in your creative life since becoming a caregiver? 

In the early years of parenting, I stopped writing completely. I was a bit of a mess, and I was unable to see a space for writing or creativity when there were all these more immediate needs of work and caretaking. 

In this time, I learned that, for me, two thirds of the writing process is a kind of thinking/buffering/information gathering/storing energy phase. I am not typically a “write every day” kind of person. I can do it. I can force myself. But it’s often not fruitful, and a lot of what I create when I’m trying to write daily is junk. So, I think caregiving taught me that I can survive long periods where I’m not creating, and the walking, thinking, and processing that happen in those phases are a hugely useful part of the creative process for me. 

I also think it’s weirdly helpful to learn that while creativity may be personally beneficial, output isn’t required. Unless your job depends on publication, you don’t have to publish. You don’t have to be acknowledged as a creative person by others to be a creative person. It’s easy to get stuck in this capitalist productivity mindset where your work is only meaningful or real if it’s accepted and printed or posted. I can get caught up in that concern, where I’m creating just for acclaim or accolades.

Being pushed by parenting out of the cycle (create, submit, publish, repeat) forced me to see the importance of creativity for the sake of creativity, of making something you feel good about because the process was beneficial and for the joy of seeing the finished thing, whatever form it may take. 

Now that I have fewer caregiving demands, I can envision writing in a more concentrated and sustained way. I have a book project I’m working on, and when my daughter goes back to college in a few weeks, I can see spending a lot of nights when I’m not working my day job working on that project. I’m sad about her leaving but having this creative work in mind helps offset that sadness. 

What is difficult about being creative and a caregiver?

The discipline required to rapidly shift in and out of one type of thinking to another. The only way I wrote at all when my kids were younger (and I did start to get back to it more fully when they were 10-12 or so) was to write a few minutes at a time in between work and caregiving obligations. It required an intense focus that I may have lost, now that they are older. I feel like I burned out my brain by trying to write two novel drafts in three years while they were in middle and high school. The process feels ridiculous to me, looking back on it. I worked 9 or so hours a day at my job, did editing for a literary journal, and then wrote during every spare minute when I wasn’t doing house- and kid-related tasks. It was invigorating but also so draining. I think so many caregivers are torn between so many different responsibilities. It’s simply hard to maintain a schedule with endless obligations and the 5 AM writing hour or the few minutes in between work calls or whatever. I realize there are worse fates in the world than being extremely busy, and choosing to write in these down periods is a choice when you could choose to do something more obviously restorative. So, I don’t mean to come across as complain-y. But the reality of trying to do creative work while also being a caregiver is that it’s challenging, and it’s probably better to try to pace yourself and not berate yourself for a perceived lack of productivity.

What are some creative milestones you’re looking forward to? Or ones you “missed” due to both/and aspects of your life? 

I’m debuting really late by publishing industry standards. I’m 55. Had I not had children, maybe this would have happened earlier, but I obviously would never trade my kids for any number of books. For a long time, I had regrets about not pushing through to publish a book earlier. Now I try to think that this is just how it was always going to happen for me. I didn’t get my shit together until I was 35, and then I had a bit of a breakdown in my early 40s. So, this is my trajectory. It’s exciting but also panic-inducing. I want to write a novel-ish thing after this, and the panic comes from thinking I don’t have as much time as I want to do all the creative things I want to do. I try to keep this ambition in check by reminding myself, pretty much every day, that humans and daily happiness and connections to other people matter more than any writing achievement I will have. 

❤️️ if the wisdom of good creatures like Amy has been helpful to you, click the little heart at the top or the bottom of the post to help other writers find us ❤️️

What advice would you give someone who has a creative practice and is embarking on becoming a caregiver?

Low expectations for what you will actually be able to do. If you leave writing (or whatever your creative outlet is for a while) you will most likely go back to it. 

What advice would you give someone who is a caregiver that wants to start a creative practice?

Do it when you can. Learn to embrace small bursts of creativity you will have. Write for five minutes. Be okay with that. Give yourself a break. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Don’t expect much.

If you’re a parent, don’t try to be a perfect parent (i.e., never any screen time or whatever rule you think you have to follow). I remember going to a therapist once and telling him, “We don’t eat at the table – we just sit and watch tv while we’re eating dinner,” and he was like, “Is this a happy time for you, is it causing problems?” And I said, “no, it’s not really causing any problems, we like it,” but I had been lugging around this sense of what I needed to do or be as a parent and as a family and all the guilt that came with doing things in a way I thought was wrong. I let it go. We happily watched Parks and Rec or whatever and laughed and bonded, and it was fine. In the scheme of things, this was obviously a minor concern, but it helped to break away from an idea of perfection in caregiving and also with regard to creativity.

Just because someone else is writing from 8 to noon somehow every single day doesn’t mean this is what you have to do or that your creative process and output will be like someone else’s. Any time you devote to it will help your mental health probably. And if you try to force it and it’s not happening or making you feel worse, wait a month or even a year and try again. Making art should be something that you enjoy or at least that brings something positive to your life, not something you do because someone says you have to in order to have a meaningful life. 

What has caregiving given you / taken away from you?

I think empathy is central to writing well and creating emotional resonance in writing. When I was starting out as a writer, I considered myself an empathic person and really loved the idea of getting into someone else’s perspective and thinking about the world the way I thought they did. But I feel like being a caregiver has deepened this for me. The connection I have with my kids is so close that I feel like I can really sometimes see the world as I think they might (I’m sure I’m wrong! I’m sure they would say I’m wrong!). But I guess it’s provided me with more empathy, which I think has helped with writing. Also, patience and an appreciation for the unexpected – and that has filtered into my writing, I think. I’ve started making stories that take a weird turn or have an element that seems initially not to fit, and I think this is very much a byproduct of caregiving, which is often about accommodating the unexpected. 

Taken away – well, I’m much more cautious. I’m more of a worrier. I used to be more reckless. Maybe it’s a good thing not to be, but I do sometimes miss the abandon that came with not having dependents. I do think writing provides that sense of abandon sometimes, though, when a text is coming out easily and there’s a freedom in where it’s going. It’s obviously different from being carefree in life, but it’s still a kind of liberation I love. 

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Amy Stuber’s fiction has appeared in the Missouri Review, Colorado Review, the Masters Review, Joyland, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She’s an editor at Split Lip Magazine, and she lives in Lawrence, KS. Her debut story collection, SAD GROWNUPS, will be released October 2024. She’s working slowly but surely on a book called THE NATURAL WORLD, an excerpt of which can be found here. She’s on Instagram @amy_stuber_ and online at amystuber.com.

You can find more information about Amy’s upcoming events and publications on her web site here.  If you’re in NYC, DC, Providence, or KC, please come say hi at her upcoming readings. You can order her book, Sad Grownups, from Stillhouse Press or Bookshop or request it from your independent bookstore or local library!

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Mental Health and Motherhood 2024 Conference

This looks so great—on October 11, the 2024 Mental Health & Motherhood Virtual Conference will feature live-streamed speakers with backgrounds that include psychology and health. You can read more about the sessions and speakers and buy your tickets here.

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Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. I’m so glad you’re here.

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