This post was originally sent through my author newsletter on July 22, 2022. To subscribe to my newsletter and receive up-to-date news, musings, and more, click HERE.
This week's Creating While Parenting interview is with Corey Ann Haydu, who is the author of an assortment of wonderful books for kids and teens. I first met Corey through the New School's MFA in Creative Writing program. We weren't in the same cohort, so we met as alums...and then she moved into my neighborhood! These days, I'm always happy to see her smiling face when we cross paths.
Corey is the author of the Hand-Me-Down Magic series. Her most recent middle-grade is One Jar of Magic, which comes out in paperback on August 23rd. Her newest YA is Lawless Spaces. She also has a picture book on the way.
Corey has two daughters: Fia, age 4, and Thisbe, who was born in July! (Corey sent me her answers three days before giving birth, so you'll see a reference to being pregnant below...) Congratulations!!
Here's Corey's website and her Instagram and Twitter. Don't forget to BUY HER BOOKS.
I'm thrilled to have Corey participating in this series, because she writes so eloquently about being a writer and being a parent on her own social media and newsletter! Read on for her answers to my three questions.
1. How would you describe yourself as a creator/artist/maker?
I am an author of children's books for all ages, picture book through YA. I've been working in children's publishing for almost 15 years, publishing for almost ten years now, and I have both evolved and stayed on theme I think! I've sort of slowly made my way into different age categories and different genres, but thematically I tend towards battling the idea of perfection as something to strive for, and finding hope and joy in challenging circumstances. I think those are sort of my areas of interest as a writer, and I seem to be able to return to both of them again and again. A few books in, I started playing with magic as a way to get at these themes more precisely, and that's become a really central part of my work—using magic as a way to unveil what is real and tangible and important and meaningful in our ordinary lives.
I'd like to think I write for the readers, and I do on some level, but I also really, really write for me. I myself am in a constant search for hope and joy in the midst of challenges—not by pretending the challenges away but by seeing both the difficulty and the light clearly. I like honesty—not everything's fine! but instead everything's not fine, but here are some anchors of beauty to hold on to in the midst of all this not-okay-ness. And I'm also in a constant battle to stop holding myself to impossible standards, trying to resist the allure and the lie of perfection that I grew up with. So I think I write for me most of all, to keep trying to center myself on these ideas, to keep trying to relearn how to be in the world, to keep trying to understand these big ideas and how to survive what is hard both out in the world and inside myself.
2. How does being a parent impact and interact with your creative life?
More and more every day, I find that the intersection of parenting and creativity is HUGE. Just in a really literal way, I have been exposed to different age ranges of children's literature through my own child, and because of that I've pushed myself into new spaces. The child experience is so front and center in my world at all times. My daughter, Fia's concerns and struggles interest and engulf me not only as a parent, but also as a writer. In the same way as I write to try to figure out my own relationship with hope or perfection, I'm also writing to try to figure it all out on her level. I have a picture book coming out in 2024 that is really directly related to parenting challenges I faced in her toddlerhood. It was written as a way for me to sort out my own complicated relationship with being a big personality, a person with big feelings, and how to find that self-compassion and acceptance so that I could ultimately give her bigness and emotional landscape compassion and acceptance too. I mean, it's honestly a really beautiful thing for me, to have this new place to draw inspiration from, and I feel really lucky that my work lets me sort of unwind what is hard for me to understand in the world.
Logistically, of course, it can be tough, but for me, writing is generally a refuge—a place I get to go and not a place I have to go, if that makes sense? So there can be stress, especially in Covid times of balancing parenting and writing, but usually writing is like my little gift to myself when real life and parenting life feel messy and hard and exhausting. I know that's not the case for everyone, but that's my relationship with my work, and it's stayed pretty consistent even in parenthood.
3. What keeps you most connected to your creativity these days?
What a tough question! You know, I think right now, friendships are what keep me connected to creativity. I've discovered over the last few years what a legit extrovert I am, something I don't think I knew about myself at all for many, many years. I really need to be connected to people in order to connect to creativity. I'm super curious about people and their lives and their feelings and choices and relationships with one another, so being around that energy and in the world in that way helps me come up with new ideas and new ways of seeing the world. I have a group of friends who are also moms who I see every week, and honestly that weekly 2-hour meet-up is something that both grounds me and lets my brain move more easily, more airily.
I've found walking is also something that helps my creativity. I'm very pregnant, so that's gotten trickier these last few months, but long walks either with others or alone really help my brain loosen up, and I often find myself getting new ideas and jotting down little bits and pieces of thoughts on those walks.
