The State of Creation

I stumbled across Canteen recently. It considers itself to be a "new take on the literary magazine" by pairing accomplished writers personal stories or insight with their fiction or poetry. The excerpts available online for their first two issues caught my attention. Andrew Sean Greer writes of his first novel, which reminded me of my own first attempts.

And in issue two, Joyce Maynard writes about the influence her mother had on her writing. As a (frazzled) mother of two (very small) children, I struggle constantly to keep the two halves of myself together: the writer and the diaper changer, midnight nurturer. And while much of what Maynard had to say about her mother's ability to tell stories and to teach by example was impressive, what I found most encouraging is that she tells us, "Later in life, once my sister and I were grown, my mother published books of her own."

Looking around my cluttered, claustrophobic life this gray morning, there is hope.